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拍品專文
Set in the Loire River, Félix Vallotton’s Un soir sur la Loire depicts a landscape beyond pure truth. In melding reality with experience, the painting captures the sensation of a place. Un soir sur la Loire was created in 1923 during Vallotton’s trip to Champtoceaux, near Nantes; there he stayed in a pension run by nuns. He had visited the region before, spending time outside of Tours, and he returned for the glorious light and to paint alongside his colleague Paul Deltombe, who lived in the Loire Valley. It was Deltombe who played such an instrumental role in organizing the purchase of Vallotton’s Femme Lisant (Ducrey, vol. III, no. 1433) by what is now the Musée d’Arts de Nantes.
After returning from Champtoceaux, Vallotton wrote to his brother Paul of the many sketches he had made in the region and his hopes to ‘draw about ten paintings from them’ (F. Vallotton to P. Vallotton, 23 July 1923, quoted in M. Ducrey, Félix Vallotton, L'oeuvre peint, Le peintre, Lausanne, 2005, vol. III, p. 801). A month later, on 17 August, he again wrote to his brother of the ‘happy’ canvases he had painted (F. Vallotton to P. Vallotton, 17 August 1923 quoted in ibid.). Un soir sur la Loire was one of the thirteen canvases that Vallotton created from his sketches, and with its decadent colour palette and lyrical title, the painting evokes arcadian joy, June evenings, the first glow of summer. Across the hills Vallotton has painted are rows of dark green grapevines, and the setting sun casts purple shadows across the land beneath. The Loire River extends languidly and capaciously, and in the centre, noted the artist, sat ‘a sandbank and an island of willows’ (ibid., p. 1923). Although far from a naturalistic depiction, Un soir sur la Loire captures an intensity of feeling, a sweetness of sky and blazing light.
Vallotton’s graphic aesthetic developed through his printmaking practice, and though he had largely abandoned the medium by the time Un soir sur la Loire was created, such influence is clearly discernible in the present work. Both the flat, unmodulated colours and the compression of spatial depth recall the woodblock prints he made for magazines including La Revue blanche. Like much of Paris, Vallotton too would have witnessed the craze for Japanese woodcuts, which reached its apex following an exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890. The ukiyo-e prints were admired for their vertiginous perspectives, hidden horizons, and closely cropped imagery, inspiring artists to reconceive their perspectival systems. In Un soir sur la Loire, Vallotton incorporated a sense of aloof detachment into his painting, bestowing upon himself, and thus the viewer, a god-like perspective of one who sees all.
If painting once served as a portal onto the world and the principal means of representation, the advent of photography in the mid-19th century meant that painters could strive for more than simply producing truthful depictions of their surroundings. As a result, the landscape became the site for visual revolution. Once considered a lesser genre according to the Academy’s hierarchy, over the course of the 19th century, landscape painting became, argues Richard Thomson, a new ‘vehicle for the artist’s imagination’ and thus a new locus for pictorial innovation (R. Thomson, ‘Pictures of Progress, Nationalism and Tradition’, in Monet to Matisse: Landscape Painting in France 1874-1914, exh. cat., National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1994, pp. 14-15). Long based on an illusion – the representation of the physical world contained within a flat plane – painters began to challenge this heritage and Vallotton was particularly suited to this fight. Indeed, his paysages composés were clear in their intentions: these are invented scenes that play with veracity and representation, reality and experience.
After returning from Champtoceaux, Vallotton wrote to his brother Paul of the many sketches he had made in the region and his hopes to ‘draw about ten paintings from them’ (F. Vallotton to P. Vallotton, 23 July 1923, quoted in M. Ducrey, Félix Vallotton, L'oeuvre peint, Le peintre, Lausanne, 2005, vol. III, p. 801). A month later, on 17 August, he again wrote to his brother of the ‘happy’ canvases he had painted (F. Vallotton to P. Vallotton, 17 August 1923 quoted in ibid.). Un soir sur la Loire was one of the thirteen canvases that Vallotton created from his sketches, and with its decadent colour palette and lyrical title, the painting evokes arcadian joy, June evenings, the first glow of summer. Across the hills Vallotton has painted are rows of dark green grapevines, and the setting sun casts purple shadows across the land beneath. The Loire River extends languidly and capaciously, and in the centre, noted the artist, sat ‘a sandbank and an island of willows’ (ibid., p. 1923). Although far from a naturalistic depiction, Un soir sur la Loire captures an intensity of feeling, a sweetness of sky and blazing light.
Vallotton’s graphic aesthetic developed through his printmaking practice, and though he had largely abandoned the medium by the time Un soir sur la Loire was created, such influence is clearly discernible in the present work. Both the flat, unmodulated colours and the compression of spatial depth recall the woodblock prints he made for magazines including La Revue blanche. Like much of Paris, Vallotton too would have witnessed the craze for Japanese woodcuts, which reached its apex following an exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890. The ukiyo-e prints were admired for their vertiginous perspectives, hidden horizons, and closely cropped imagery, inspiring artists to reconceive their perspectival systems. In Un soir sur la Loire, Vallotton incorporated a sense of aloof detachment into his painting, bestowing upon himself, and thus the viewer, a god-like perspective of one who sees all.
If painting once served as a portal onto the world and the principal means of representation, the advent of photography in the mid-19th century meant that painters could strive for more than simply producing truthful depictions of their surroundings. As a result, the landscape became the site for visual revolution. Once considered a lesser genre according to the Academy’s hierarchy, over the course of the 19th century, landscape painting became, argues Richard Thomson, a new ‘vehicle for the artist’s imagination’ and thus a new locus for pictorial innovation (R. Thomson, ‘Pictures of Progress, Nationalism and Tradition’, in Monet to Matisse: Landscape Painting in France 1874-1914, exh. cat., National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1994, pp. 14-15). Long based on an illusion – the representation of the physical world contained within a flat plane – painters began to challenge this heritage and Vallotton was particularly suited to this fight. Indeed, his paysages composés were clear in their intentions: these are invented scenes that play with veracity and representation, reality and experience.