ANDRE BARBIER | Bateau sur la Seine
Oil on Canvas
46 x 61 cms / 18 x 24 inches
Signed 'André Barbier' (lower left)
A small vessel advances across a broad expanse of river, positioned slightly left of centre and cutting a diagonal wake through luminous water. The Seine fills almost the entire composition, its surface articulated in pale creams, blues and soft greens that dissolve towards a high horizon. On the far right, distant riverside architecture reveals itself through the mist. The viewpoint is elevated and set behind the moving boat, so that the widening wake draws the eye into depth. Oil is applied in layered, broken strokes across the water, with thicker passages describing the churned surface in the boat’s path. Painted during the artist’s sustained engagement with the Seine in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, Bateau sur la Seine forms part of a broader series in which river traffic is observed within expansive, light-filled conditions.
Inspired by his Impressionist forbears, André Barbier delighted in depicting verdant forests and luminous seascapes at different times of the day and in a variety of atmospheric conditions. Like many of his contemporaries in early nineteenth-century Paris, Barbier travelled extensively in pursuit of subjects for his landscapes.
In 1916 Barbier met Claude Monet and the two artists immediately struck up a friendship. Monet was so taken with Barbiers works that he sponsored an exhibition of his works with a preface by Monets biographer and friend, Gustave Geffroy, who urged him to build of mist and light, a world of poetry. Although a follower of the Impressionists, Barbiers style is wholeheartedly distinct. Barbier built up compositions using delicate layers of paint in a post-impressionist manner, often using a flickering outline to the forms within the landscape and imbuing his compositions with a delicate haze of light.
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