Atelier de l’artiste, puis par descendance

Vente Chartres, Galerie de Chartres, Lelièvre-Maiche-Paris, Vente Hermann-Paul , 23 octobre 2000, lot 11

Collection particulière, France

Eric Gillis Fine Art, Bruxelles

Acquis auprès de cette dernière par l'actuel propriétaire le 10 mars 2017

Collection Louis Grandchamp des Raux

Bruxelles, Eric Gillis Fine Art, 1785-1919. Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture, catalogue n°19, octobre 2017, n°10 p.76, reproduit en couleur p.77

C. Jeancolas, La Peinture des Nabis, FVW, Paris, 2002, reproduit p.17

A politically engaged artist and renowned caricaturist, René Georges Hermann-Paul was for forty years one of France’s leading illustrators. A student first at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs and the Académie Julian, then in the studios of painters Henry Lerolle and Gustave Colin, Hermann-Paul began his career by making lithographs in black and white before moving, as of 1891, into colour, which truly revealed his talent for caricature. Although he enjoyed depicting the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie, as in Élégantes sur les Boulevards, Hermann-Paul was equally a participant in the political struggles of his time. An ardent Dreyfusard, he worked with the satirical press, producing antimilitarist and anticolonialist drawings for Anarchist periodicals.

Dated 1895, this drawing is close to the way the Nabis depicted scenes of Belle Époque Paris. The influence of Japanese prints, the use of flat colours, the tight framing, the compression of the foreground and background, and the intentional omitting of details reveal the artist’s powerful graphic vision and place his art firmly within the avant-garde artistic currents of the 1890s. The composition focuses attention on the two women, whilst the lightly sketched background – more clearly visible in the lithograph - shows a woman hailing a carriage in front of some shops. These twin figures, mirroring one another, each holding the hem of their skirt with an opposite hand, are both surprising and alluring. The speckled pattern of the jackets, achieved by applying ink over a flat background of purple, is reminiscent of works painted by Édouard Vuillard around the same time. This Parisian scene, reproduced three years later as a lithograph, brings to mind the painting by his friend Félix Vallotton, Scène de Rue à Paris, 1897 (New York, Metropolitan Museum), which also depicts women strolling along the boulevards, dressed in the same fashionable outfits, a horse-drawn carriage and shops in the background. At the time, Hermann-Paul and Vallotton were working very closely together, supplying the satirical newspapers with their caricatures and humoristic drawings.