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Lot Essay
In 1928 Braque returned to the town of Dieppe on the Normandy coast, where he had spent much of his childhood. It was there that he painted Barques au sec, a work which brilliantly combines Braque’s incomparable feeling for modernist composition with the French landscape painting tradition. Camille Corot, Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet had found inspiration in the quiet harbors and on the luminous beaches of the north-west coast of France, and now “the moist silvery light of the Normandy coasts, its cliffs, broad beaches and clear horizons…began to exert their appeal on Braque” (E. Mullins, Braque, 1968, p. 121). The composition of Barques au sec also shows clear inflections of the artist’s famous Cubist still lives. In the present work, Braque arranges the elements of a crepuscular seaside landscape with characteristic deftness, displaying his remarkable sense of how plane, form and color and interact.
The scene depicts three small wooden boats drawn up on a pebble beach. The dark sky instills a feeling of nocturnal mystery, heightened by the lack of human presence. The sea, stretching to the flat horizon, is brown: an incongruous element typical of Braque. He treats the gray and white pebbles of the beach with a richly textural Pointillist technique, paralleled by the pale, sandy faces of the grass-topped cliffs. His masterly variation of texture is evident in the contrast offered by the smooth, flat planes of the sea, sky and boats. Braque renders the details of the vessels by incisions made into the layers of paint to reveal the canvas below. The small wooden boats are strikingly foreshortened, depicted from three different angles. Two masts rise dramatically to the top of the canvas, their verticality splitting up the composition. The angularity and altered perspective of the arrangement arouses a dissonant and intriguing impression, heightened by the sharpness of the lemon-yellow detail at its center. At once jarring and harmonious, this striking composition shows the French artist as a master of powerful, understated modernism.
The scene depicts three small wooden boats drawn up on a pebble beach. The dark sky instills a feeling of nocturnal mystery, heightened by the lack of human presence. The sea, stretching to the flat horizon, is brown: an incongruous element typical of Braque. He treats the gray and white pebbles of the beach with a richly textural Pointillist technique, paralleled by the pale, sandy faces of the grass-topped cliffs. His masterly variation of texture is evident in the contrast offered by the smooth, flat planes of the sea, sky and boats. Braque renders the details of the vessels by incisions made into the layers of paint to reveal the canvas below. The small wooden boats are strikingly foreshortened, depicted from three different angles. Two masts rise dramatically to the top of the canvas, their verticality splitting up the composition. The angularity and altered perspective of the arrangement arouses a dissonant and intriguing impression, heightened by the sharpness of the lemon-yellow detail at its center. At once jarring and harmonious, this striking composition shows the French artist as a master of powerful, understated modernism.