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Lot Essay
Cyrille Martin has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
After receiving the Grand Prix at the age of nineteen from the École des Beaux-Art in his home town of Toulouse, Henri Martin moved to Paris to continue his studies with the academic painter Jean-Paul Laurens. Laurens introduced Martin to the masters of the Italian Renaissance, whose works he studied carefully while on an extended stay in Rome starting in 1883. Martin returned to Paris in 1889 full of lessons from the old masters and memories of the soft Italian light. Whereas before the Italian voyage his works were somewhat cold with their painstaking attention to detail, now his compositions were atmospheric and bathed in warm light, as seen in Saint-Cirq, soleil. To accomplish this, Martin experimented with Pointillism, the Neo-Impressionist method of modeling form with contrasting colored dots developed by Georges Seurat.
Sun bathes ivy-covered houses and an imposing medieval fortress in Martin's romantic Saint-Cirq, soleil, painted in the 1920s. Perched on a cliff above the Lot river in southwestern France, Saint-Cirq Lapopie, has long inspired artists and writers by its narrow streets and timber and stone houses with sloping brown-tiled roofs. Though Martin was among the first to paint the idyllic town, he was not alone in appreciating it's charms; André Breton would also make Saint-Cirq Lapopie his summer home. Saint-Cirq, soleil is a monumental and highly finished canvas within the series of paintings Martin produced of his beloved locale.
After receiving the Grand Prix at the age of nineteen from the École des Beaux-Art in his home town of Toulouse, Henri Martin moved to Paris to continue his studies with the academic painter Jean-Paul Laurens. Laurens introduced Martin to the masters of the Italian Renaissance, whose works he studied carefully while on an extended stay in Rome starting in 1883. Martin returned to Paris in 1889 full of lessons from the old masters and memories of the soft Italian light. Whereas before the Italian voyage his works were somewhat cold with their painstaking attention to detail, now his compositions were atmospheric and bathed in warm light, as seen in Saint-Cirq, soleil. To accomplish this, Martin experimented with Pointillism, the Neo-Impressionist method of modeling form with contrasting colored dots developed by Georges Seurat.
Sun bathes ivy-covered houses and an imposing medieval fortress in Martin's romantic Saint-Cirq, soleil, painted in the 1920s. Perched on a cliff above the Lot river in southwestern France, Saint-Cirq Lapopie, has long inspired artists and writers by its narrow streets and timber and stone houses with sloping brown-tiled roofs. Though Martin was among the first to paint the idyllic town, he was not alone in appreciating it's charms; André Breton would also make Saint-Cirq Lapopie his summer home. Saint-Cirq, soleil is a monumental and highly finished canvas within the series of paintings Martin produced of his beloved locale.