Provenance

Georges Bergaud (director of the Galerie Georges Petit).

Louis Loucheur; acquired from the above.

Private Collection, France.

Sale; Salle Galliéra, Paris, 18 June 1961, lot 51.

Private Collection, France.

Gladwell & Patterson, London, acquired from the above in 2022.

Bibliography

Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, Henri Le Sidaner : Paysages Intimes, (Editions Monelle Hayot, 2013), n°355, reproduced p.146.

Introduction

A contemporary of the Post-Impressionists, Henri Le Sidaner’s approach to painting is whole heartedly unique. His technique was often close to Pointillism, but Le Sidaner did not share the Pointillists’ love of colour, preferring greys and opals to create mystery and atmosphere. Instead, he used Pointillist techniques to make the surfaces of his paintings shimmer and blur.

Since moving to the picturesque, hill-top village of Gerberoy, in northern France in 1901, Le Sidaner’s seductive views of his gardens, with their recently vacated tables dappled in sunlight and overhung by roses, would cement his reputation as a unique and unclassifiable artist. Le Sidaner spent the summer months in Gerberory, but escaped the cold winter’s by travelling elsewhere in France. In 1914, he purchased a second home in Versailles, which quickly became his favorite residence.

While most of Henri Le Sidaner’s works are the products of a single setting, Evening Glow is almost unique in its combination of the parks of Versailles and the artist’s garden in Gerberoy. Understanding the separate influences of these two locales is therefore crucial for an analysis of this work.

Between Versailles and Gerberoy

Having spent over a decade in which he would work in Gerberoy over the summer, and travel to warmer climes during the town’s bitterly cold winters, Henri Le Sidaner found his established routine interrupted by the Great War. Although Gerberoy was never occupied, it was close enough to the Western Front for the artist to clearly hear the sounds of artillery fire. It was for this reason that Le Sidaner would spend most of 1916 painting in Versailles, studying the sleepy ponds and walkways of its park which had been deserted by gardeners called up for war. For Le Sidaner, whose genius was best exemplified by his views of human absence, Versailles would offer him the perfect setting in which to refine his painting. As the artist recalled: ‘The leaves form thick and heavy carpets, which surround the beauty of the architecture and encircle the water in the basins’. The profuse vegetation which clings to the house and the water in Evening Glow, a departure from Le Sidaner’s previous neatly manicured settings, is clearly a product of his experiences in Versailles.

In September of 1916, Le Sidaner would return to Gerberoy to spend a week enjoying the company of his close friend, the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. Nominated for a nobel prize on six separate occasions and instrumental in the symbolist movement, Verhaeren was one of the leading exponents of French poetry and provided a constant source of support and inspiration for Le Sidaner in his early career. Whilst in Gerberoy with Verhaeren, Le Sidaner produced multiple studies of the small summer pavilion which he had constructed next to his rose garden. It was these studies which inspired Le Sidaner to create Evening Glow, upon his return to Versailles. The painting is a fusion of the artists’ Gerberoy pavilion with the canals and autumnal impressions of Versailles. Le Sidaner elongated the square pavilion into a rectangular shape in order to better integrate it with the composition of Evening Glow.

Transiting between Gerberoy and Versailles so as to create a perfect subject matter is emblematic of Le Sidaner’s unique approach to painting. Realising that he would never have the time to fully capture the plays of light and changing atmosphere that he so treasured, Le Sidaner instead strove to immerse himself in experiencing these moments, to re-create it more perfectly once it had passed. A mark of his brilliance, Le Sidaner would routinely memorize a scene and later reproduce it in the studio. As his son, Rémy Le Sidaner, recalls, ‘when my father caught one of these ‘special effects’, he nodded in my direction and just stood there, gazing out towards the scene, impressing on his mind the imagery he had just witnessed’. It is this push to contemplate rather than immediately capture that sets Le Sidaner apart from his contemporaries. Here was an artist who truly saw his vocation as not merely representation but experience itself. Through his almost meditative process, the artist was able to ensure that when he arrived at the studio he was able to employ an understanding that went beyond simply capturing the surface of things.

The Poetry of Twilight

‘It is l’heure de Le Sidaner, the time when he is most profoundly himself … the colours become spiritual as they resist the falling darkness to which they will ultimately succumb. The ordinary is transformed into magic by the miracle of the moment and of the silence. Le Sidaner is able to depict the sweetness of life transfigured by love and made visible through physical objects’.

Camille Mauclair on Le Sidaner’s evening light -

Painted at the height of his career, Evening Glow is characteristic of Le Sidaner’s most verdant and richly textured compositions from the 1910s. In these works, predominantly painted around Gerberoy, human figures almost never intrude upon Le Sidaner’s compositions, however the brightly lit window at the centre of the painting still animates the quiet scene, implying but not confirming human presence. The sense of understated mystery and gentle poetry that Le Sidaner has imbued this work with reveals the artist’s inheritance from his Symbolist-inspired early years and his friendship with Verhaeren; while the brighter and more intense elements of the palette, the subtly worked contrasts and the dappled application of pigment evokes his debt to Impressionism.

Le Sidaner’s lit window in Evening Glow is perhaps the most striking facet of the work. Emerging amidst the shadowy foliage, the window immediately centres the viewers eye, encouraging them to peer through the crepuscular leaves and branches in a mirror of evening vision, where the point of light emerges from growing darkness. The artist had begun to employ the motif of contrasting the red-oranges of the lit window with his favoured evening light in the early 1910s, particularly in his views of northern French towns. These points of light were often small vignettes within the work rather than their primary focus.

This restrained approach would change with 1916’s Evening Glow, where the orange light from the window assumes a far greater importance within the painting. The union of the fiery window with the richly coloured autumn leaves create an effect of great illumination within the painting, lighting up the evening. While the viewer is still situated in twilight thanks to the rich greens, greys, and opals throughout the painting, the overwhelming impression is one of evening luminosity.

Consequently, where Le Sidaner might often use a depopulated table or the still fluttering curtains on a balcony to imply human absence, it could be argued that the present work inverts this approach; Evening Glow alludes to human presence through the lit window shining where we would not expect it, a quiet leafy canal. The artist is often characterised by Signac’s observation that: ‘his œuvre displays a taste for tender, soft and silent atmospheres. Gradually, he even went as far as to eliminate all human presence from his pictures, as if he feared that the slightest human form might disturb their muffled silence’.[4] Yet Evening Glow suggests Le Sidaner was capable of more complexity, creating a tension between the silent waterway and the human presence implied by his brilliantly lit window.

Returning to Evening Glow

While Le Sidaner travelled widely around France and Belgium, painting a great variety of subjects all unified by his twilight focus, he is best known for producing a small number of multiple treatments of his favourite settings. While the garden table at his house in Gerberoy is the most famous example of this practice, Le Sidaner opted to return to Evening Glow on two further occasions, a demonstration that he saw this composition as one of his best.

After painting this first and largest treatment of the Evening Glow in 1916, Le Sidaner would return to the subject eight years later to produce another work, Le Pavillon dans les Feuilles. Much smaller than the 1916 painting, the artist captures the pavilion in daylight, emphasising the verdant greens of summer rather than his usual nocturnal tones in his study and altering its profile and the shape of its window. While this 1924 iteration provides an interesting counterpoint to the 1916 painting, a more important adaptation was to follow.

In 1928, Le Sidaner was the subject of an extensive biography by Camille Mauclair which is still in print to this day. Mauclair’s work remains one of the few biographies from the period written when the subject was still at the height of their artistic powers. Le Sidaner’s interviews with the author are crucial to our understanding of his unique approach, and they also generated the artist’s best known summation of his almost impossible to pin down style. Responding to a question about which artistic school he belonged to, the painter famously responded ‘I belong to none. But if you absolutely insist on categorizing me, I am an Intimist’.

As part of this monograph, Mauclair gave Le Sidaner the opportunity to produce two engravings with which to illustrate the book. Tasked with choosing work which he felt best captured the essence of his style, Le Sidaner settled upon Evening Glow. With such limited space to show his works, Le Sidaner evidently saw the composition as emblematic of his approach, a significant endorsement from any artist about their own work.

It is easy to see why Henri Le Sidaner favoured Evening Glow. Combining the verdant textures the artist developed at Gerberoy with the quiet canals of his earlier career, the work bridges two of the artist’s favourite subjects. Additionally, with its lit window emerging from early evening light, the work demonstrates the artist’s remarkable understanding of atmosphere, the underpinning of his reputation as the most inimitable artist of the Post-Impressionist generation.

Conclusion

After completing Evening Glow, Le Sidaner likely showed the painting to Verhaeren in November, where they met for a final time before the poet’s tragic death in a train accident later in the month. Soon after, the painting was bought from the Galerie Georges Petit by the industrialist Louis Loucheur, a senior figure in the French government and avid art collector. A great supporter of Les Nabis (his portrait by Vuillard can still be seen in Lille), Loucheur was a highly discerning collector whose endorsement of Evening Glow is testament to its quality. That we have such a clear understanding of both the conception and early ownership of the painting allows us a rare opportunity to fully understand the individual context and creative process behind the work that now stands before us.

Evening Glow combines Henri Le Sidaner’s unique brushwork and approach to twilight atmosphere with one of his most unique compositions. In combining elements of both Versailles and Gerberoy, the artist demonstrated his desire to create an ideal subject matter through which he could express his style. That he would later choose the scenery developed in Evening Glow to stand as a paradigm of his approach shows that he succeeded in this endeavour.

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