Albert Dubois-Pillet

In 1884, Albert Dubois-Pillet helped found the Société des artistes indépendants in Paris, a progressive artists’ group to which Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Henri-Edmond Cross also belonged. Dubois-Pillet, a 38-year-old self-taught artist, had pursued a career as an officer in the French army. Although he had only limited time to paint, he achieved prominence in the Paris art scene already in the 1870s, for example with classical still lifes that appeared in the annual Salon in 1877 and 1879. In the mid-1880s, Dubois-Pillet was among the first artists to be inspired by Seurat’s new way of painting and embrace Divisionism or Pointillism, a technique defined primarily by its dissection of the picture plane into a multiplicity of dots of pure color.

Morning on the Marne at Meaux was painted around 1886 and shows the river with a view of the Gothic cathedral of Saint-Étienne. The meandering course of the grassy bank is captured in rich green tones and appears as a horizontal band, contrasting in a decorative manner with the glowing pink and white facades of the buildings and the surface of the Marne River glittering in the morning light. The mosaic texture of the Pointillist style is clearly visible in the sky and river, while the vegetation and architectural elements are handled somewhat more freely. The painting recalls works by Signac from 1886–87 such as Clipper, Opus 155, also found in the Hasso Plattner Collection.

A year after Dubois-Pillet’s death in 1890, a section of the Salon des Indépendants was devoted to a retrospective in his honor; Morning on the Marne at Meaux was included among the works exhibited there.

In the catalogue raisonné of Dubois-Pillet’s oeuvre compiled by Patrick Offenstadt, Morning on the Marne at Meaux is listed as no. 57 and is dated to around 1888. Only 153 works by the artist are documented. Another view of the Marne painted by Dubois-Pillet is now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Daniel Zamani

Salon des Indépendants, Pavillon de la Ville de Paris, Paris, March 20–April 27, 1891, no. 431

Trésors du Petit Palais de Genève, Musée Jean Vinay, Saint-Antoine l'Illaye, 1987

Chefs-d'œuvre néo-impressionnistes, Fondation Septentrion, Marcq-en-Bareuil, 1987/1988

Tarkhoff et son temps: Chef-d'œuvre du Musée du Petit Palais, Suisse, Musée d'Art, Hiratsuka, March 26–May 5, 1991; Daimaru Museum, Tokyo, August 29–September 10, 1991, no. 61

Autour des néo-impressionnistes: Le groupe de Lagny, Musée Gatien-Bonnet, Lagny-sur-Marne; Petit Palais, Geneva; Musée des Beaux-Arts Sherbrooke, Québec, 1999

Impressionism: The Art of Landscape, Museum Barberini, Potsdam, January 21–May 28, 2017

Impressionism: The Hasso Plattner Collection, Museum Barberini, Potsdam, from September 5, 2020

1891, Jules Christophe
by 1987, Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva, inv.-no. 11402
December 2010, Art trade

Lily Bazalgette, Albert Dubois-Pillet: Sa vie et son œuvre (1846–1890), Paris 1976, p. 69, 163, ill. p. 164

Ofir Scheps, Le Néo-impressionnisme dans la collection du Petit Palais, Genève 1996, p. 14

Noël Coret, Les peintres de la vallée de la Marne: Autour de l'impressionnisme, Tournai 1996, ill. p. 69

Rainer Budde, Pointillisme, Lausanne 1998, no. 37

Autour des néo-impressionnistes: Le groupe de Lagny, exh. cat. Musée Gatien-Bonnet, Lagny-sur-Marne 1999, ill. p. 57

Jean Monneret, Catalogue raisonné du Salon des Indépendants 1884–2000: Les Indépendants dans l’histoire de l’art, Paris 2000, no. 431, p. 173

Impressionism: The Art of Landscape, exh. cat. Museum Barberini, Potsdam 2017, no. 41, ill. p. 147