Lot n° 9
Estimation :
30000 - 50000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 185 600EUR
Jules BASTIEN-LEPAGE (1848-1884
)Portrait... - Lot 9 - Ader
Jules BASTIEN-LEPAGE (1848-1884
)Portrait of Maurice Fenaille, 1883Oil
on canvas.
Signed lower left.
37 x 30 cmProvenance
:
Maurice Fenaille collection. By descent.
Exhibition :
- Jules Bastien-Lepage, École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Hôtel de Chimay, Paris, March-April 1885, n° 190
- Retrospective Exhibition Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), Marie Bashkirtseff (1860-1884), Louise Breslau (1854-1927), Musée Jules Chéret, Nice, March-April 1939, n° 12
Bibliography:
Madame Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1848-1884: Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre, Paris, M.-M. Aubrun, 1985, n°452, reproduced on p. 272.
This portrait of the young Maurice Fenaille remained in the family collection of the entrepreneur from the time of its creation until the present day. The Fenaille family and the Bastien-Lepage brothers had been close friends for many years and their relationship was enriched by commissions. The head of the family, Alphonse Fenaille, and his sister, Madame Godillot, were both painted by Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1878.
The death of the father in 1883 propelled his son Maurice to the head of the family oil company at the age of 28. The latter called on Bastien-Lepage's services to build his new status. A fervent lover of the arts since his youth, practicing drawing and painting and assiduously frequenting the artistic circles of his time, he soon established himself as an influential patron before being elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1919. The businessman and collector Gabriel Cognacq, in his eulogy of his predecessor delivered on January 13, 1940 at the Institut de France, gave a glowing review of our painting: "A portrait of Bastien-Lepage shows him as he was then: an energetic mask well balanced under the high forehead that retains the light, a clear, scrutinizing gaze, always calm, but where a glimmer of light irony sometimes lit up, accentuated by a slightly mocking crease at the corner of the lip. This portrait reveals to us a being with a cold and tenacious will, a clear-sighted intelligence, a concentrated interior life, which does not waste any of its energies in vain words and, under this wanted impassivity, a kindness, a generosity, an inexhaustible benevolence.
The choice of the two men to place the portrait in the artist's studio - then located at 12 rue Legendre - expresses a resolutely modern vision of the genre: far from a classic bourgeois interior, the commissioner is indeed installed in the heart of a working environment and in the midst of the works, thus marking a deep desire to be part of the creative world. In this regard, we note the presence of two important works executed during the last years of the painter's life, located at the back of Maurice Fenaille.
The remarkable oil on canvas Fleur du chemin ou La Petite Bergère dated 1882 (Madame Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1848-1884: Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre, Paris, M.-M. Aubrun, 1985, no. 376 (130 x 87cm), reproduced on p. 239), is positioned in the left background. Still in the artist's studio at the time of his death, the work was included in the retrospective exhibition of the artist's work at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1885, before being sold at auction for 7,500 francs by Paul Chevallier at the dispersion of the Jules Bastien-Lepage collection on May 11 and 12 of the same year. The painting was again presented at auction and sold for $550,000 on May 18, 2016 at Sotheby's.
Finally, the Paysage au charbonnier, l'Hiver (Ibidem, n°501 (oil on canvas, 59 x 77,5 cm), reproduced p. 295), whose size similarly occupies the rear space, is the second canvas represented from the painter's reserve. Its realization, undated, would logically have been carried out in the region of Damvillers in 1882, like Fleur du chemin as well as Bois de Damvillers, l'Hiver (Ibidem, n°405 (oil on canvas, 58 x 77 cm), reproduced p. 251) or Maison blanche à Damvillers (Ibidem, n°404 (oil on canvas, 58 x 79 cm), reproduced p. 251), both painted this same year according to the exhibition catalog of 1885. This work was acquired by the city of Vernon from a Parisian gallery in 1983, in order to integrate the collection of the Alphonse-Georges Poulain Museum.
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