Henri LE SIDANER (1862-1939) - Lot 124

Lot 124
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80000 - 120000 EUR
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Result : 192 000EUR
Henri LE SIDANER (1862-1939) - Lot 124
Henri LE SIDANER (1862-1939) The canal, Mechelen, 1931 Oil on canvas. Signed lower left. Label on the back Quai des Poissonniers. 60 x 73 cm EXHIBITION: Brussels (label on back), probably Brussels, 1931, Le Sidaner exhibition, Galerie des Artistes français. RELATED WORK: Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, Le Sidaner, L'œuvre peint, l'œuvre gravé, n°1232, page 382. A preparatory pencil sketch enhanced with colored pencils of our painting is reproduced in black and white. A certificate of authenticity from Mr. Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner will be given to the buyer. Henri Le Sidaner, an impressionist symbolist After a classical training with Cabanel, Henri Le Sidaner was one of the first artists to settle in Étaples (1882-1894) where, until 1914, many French and foreign artists painted this beach with its immense horizons and changing light. Although these artists came from a wide variety of backgrounds, they were grouped together under the term "Colonie d'Étaples", but it was mainly by frequenting artists and intellectuals from the Symbolist movement, such as the painters Edmond Aman-Jean, Charles Cottet, Lucien Simon, Ernest Laurent (Seurat's friend) and Rodin, the musician Gabriel Fabre, and the poets Verhaeren and Rodenbach, that Le Sidaner forged his own artistic sensitivity. The canvases he painted from 1899 onwards, inspired by the city of Bruges, enabled him to become a member of the Salon. In these compositions, canals, deserted squares and old Flemish houses seem to bear witness to vanished presences and evoke with deep melancholy the illusion of a suspended time. It is this reflection on the unchanging and elusive meaning of time that brings the painter closer to the writer Marcel Proust who, in turn, pays homage to him by quoting him no less than seven times in The Search, where one of the protagonists is fascinated by Le Sidaner's works. It is suggested that Le Sidaner was one of the models of Elstir, the great painter of La Recherche. Henri Le Sidaner will be an active member of the Institute and his career as a painter will be prosperous, well relayed by the Goupil Gallery in London, the Knoedler galleries in New York and Georges Petit in Paris. Le Sidaner was also a tireless traveler (sometimes traveling several times a month) with stays and works painted in Flanders, Venice, Lake Maggiore, Brittany (Quimperlé, le Croisic), Chartres, Villefranche-sur-Mer and also in Gerberoy and Versailles, successive places of his family residences. There he painted - like Monet - series, colored variations of the same subject according to the light and the time of day. Our work bears witness to the intimate and silent poetry of the painter. The color treated in divided touches, the blurred and vibrant drawing, the stone facades melting in the sun's blaze are indebted to the impressionist synthesis. The solitude and silence, the absence (from 1900, the figures almost disappear from his landscapes) reveal a symbolist sensibility. Le Sidaner's synthesis, sometimes dazzling, somewhat out of step chronologically with the prevailing avant-garde (he painted until 1939), demonstrates the extent to which a singular artistic creation can also abstract itself from the dominant aesthetic trends.
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