Victor Brugairolles

Private collection, France

Sale: Coutau-Bégarie, Paris, 4 June 1999, no. 121

Piasa, Paris, 22 June 2001, no. 36

Private collection, Italy

Sale: Artcurial, Paris, 26 September 2017, lot 404

Total gallery cost: $74,000

Paris, Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, 1900, no. 204

Brugairolles debuted this painting at the Salon of 1900 with the title Le Berger et la Mer (The Shepherd and the Sea), referring to one of the well-known fables of the popular seventeenth-century French writer La Fontaine. The moralizing tale follows a prosperous shepherd who lost his fortunes with a merchant at sea only to remake them tending sheep and be tempted again by the sea, personified as Ladies of the Water (mesdames les eaux). Brugairolles’ incarnated interpretation of this fateful temptation takes shape in a trio of seductresses. Kneeling in prayer, Brugairolles sets the humble shepherd (without a sheep in sight) on a shore bathed in pinkish-purple light, a poetic haunting fantastical haze in keeping with the atmospheric aesthetics of fin-de-siècle Symbolism.

Brugairolles left the southern Languedoc region of France where he grew up for Paris as a young man to study at the École des Beaux-Arts with Fernand Cormon. He began exhibiting at the Salon in 1894 and was primarily a painter of picturesque landscapes in France and Holland, notable for their luminous effects of diffused light on land and water. Occasionally he depicted rural subjects, but only very rarely did he paint sensual figural subjects in fantastic colors which recalled his training with Cormon. The present painting is truly a unique masterpiece in his career and owes a clear debt to the ethereal, Arcadian and mythic subjects of the older painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and his younger symbolist followers like Alphonse Osbert, who was also a student of Cormon.    

Offered in its original frame of wood and gilded stucco, decorated with wreaths of oak leaf ribbons.