Henri Le Sidaner

Henri Le Sidaner developed his mature visual language in late nineteenth-century France. Born on the island of Mauritius in 1862, he was accepted to the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris around the age of twenty and two years later entered the studio of the painter Alexandre Cabanel. During the same period, he also explored the style of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, whose dissection of the picture surface into individual daubs of color would come to characterize his work. Le Sidaner’s move to the medieval village of Gerberoy, about sixty-five kilometers northwest of Paris, marks a turning point in his oeuvre. Beginning in 1901 he rented an old manor there; three years later, he purchased it and undertook extensive renovations and additions, expanding the property to include a lavish flower garden in the English style. Like his role model and older colleague Claude Monet in Giverny, he designed the layout and color scheme of his garden and used it as a backdrop for his painting.

Window with Carnations, Gerberoy was painted in 1908 and shows the view from Le Sidaner’s dining room into the inner courtyard of the manor, where he had planted an elaborate flower garden. Despite the diffuse-seeming composition with the shimmering colors typical of Pointillism, the textures of the objects arranged on the table in the foreground are precisely rendered—as are the glistening flower vase in the center and the casements of the open window, whose glass reflects the green-yellow tones of the vegetation. The pull into perspective depth, achieved by the prominent placement of the window, is intensified still more by the diagonal line of the garden path. As with many of Le Sidaner’s compositions showing a view to the outdoors, here too the traditional conception of painting as a “window to the world” has symbolic resonance. At the same time, the motif blurs the boundary between the genres of interior and landscape, a direction that artists like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard also explored in the early twentieth century.

Daniel Zamani

Société Nouvelle, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1909, no. 78

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

n.d., Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, purchased from the artist, inv.-no. 4214 and 8741
1909, M. Olive, Nantes
n.d., Galerie Lorenceau, Paris
n.d., Hammer Galleries, New York
1967, Dr. and Mrs. Armand Hammer, Los Angeles
n.d., The Armand Hammer Foundation
n.d., Nacol Fine Art, Pebble Beach
August 2011, Art trade

Le Figaro Artistique (January 24, 1929)

Camille Mauclair, Henri Le Sidaner, Paris 1928, p. 29

Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, Le Sidaner: L'œuvre peint et gravé, Paris 1989, no. 230, p. 112, ill. p. 112

Henri Le Sidaner en son jardin de Gerberoy, 1901–1939, exh. cat. Musée Départemental de l'Oise, Beauvais 2001, p. 88, ill. p. 88

Impressionism: The Art of Landscape, exh. cat. Museum Barberini, Potsdam 2017, no. 63, p. 175, ill. p. 185