Edouard HUBERTI (1818–1880)

EDOUARD HUBERTI — Saules au Salon

Few paintings illustrate Huberti’s poetic approach to landscape as vividly as Saules au bord de l’eau, whose genesis can be followed unusually closely through his correspondence. In January 1872, while working predominantly in watercolour, he described repeated attempts at a composition of “saules au bord d’une immense flaque d’eau”, seeking not sunlight but “un ciel gris lumineux et chaud reflété dans une eau dormante” — a warm, luminous grey sky reflected in still water. These experiments appear to have provided the genesis for the present monumental oil, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1873, where L’Illustration illustrated it and singled it out as “une gracieuse étude de M. Huberti”, and subsequently at the Salon of Antwerp. Still unsold, it was offered directly by the artist at Edouard Ter Bruggen’s Antwerp auction au profit des artistes in November that year. Its subject could scarcely be simpler — willows, water and a grey sky — yet it unites the qualities most characteristic of Huberti’s art and of his acknowledged admiration for Corot: restrained colour, low horizons, reflections and atmosphere taking precedence over picturesque incident. By 1980, when the painting resurfaced from the Traeys collection as Rivierlandschap, its original identity had been forgotten; its rediscovery as Saules au bord de l’eau reconnects the work with the remarkable nineteenth-century record of its creation, exhibition and attempted sale.