Franz COURTENS (1850-1943)
« Mare sous bois »
1892
Oil on canvas, strip lined.
Signed l.r.: 'Franz Courtens'.
85,5 x 116 cm (canvas) | 125 x 155 cm (framed)
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PROVENANCE
Ancienne collection Armand Follet, Pepinster (1908) ;
Ancienne collection Jules Ingenbleek (1933);
Private collection, Belgium.
EXHIBITED
München, Internationale Kunst-Austellung des Vereins Bildender Künstler Münchens “Secession”, 1894, nr. 49, as : ‘Waldpartie (Herbst).’
Antwerp, Exposition Franz Courtens, Salle Verlat, 1–14 February 1896, nr. 13, as : ‘Mare sous bois’.
Barcelona, 3. Exposición de Bellas Artes e Industrias Artísticas, Palacio de Bellas Artes, opened 23 April 1896, nr. 425, as : ‘En el bosque (18,000 pesetas)’.
Copenhagen, Den Internationale Kunstudstilling i København, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 1897, nr. 50, as: ‘Vandhul under Traeer (mare sous bois)’.
Prague, 59. Jahresaustellung des Kunstvereins für Böhmen (Krasoumná jednota), 1898, nr. 372, as: ‘V lese [In the Forest].’
LITERATURE
Gustave De Breyne-Du Bois, 800 croquis et silhouettes, Bruxelles : Alfred Castaigne Ed., 1894, p. 222, as : ‘- Mare sous bois. D’un effet papillotant.’
Gustave Van Zype, Franz Courtens, Bruxelles : Librairie nationale d’art et d’histoire, 1908, p. 98, as : ‘Mare sous bois. À M. Follet, Pepinster.’
« Franz Courtens », in : Notices biographiques…, Académie royale des sciences, …, Brussels : F. Hayez, 1909, p. 680, as : ‘Mare sous bois 1893. (Appartient à M. Follet, Pepinster).’
Gustave Van Zype, Franz Courtens, Bruxelles : Nouvelle Société d’Editions, 1933, p. 109, as : ‘Mare sous bois. À M. Jules Ingenbleeck.’
€ 32.000,-
PRICE
FRANZ COURTENS — Mare sous bois, 1892
Mare sous bois was conceived as a Salon painting in the fullest sense: an ambitious machine, carefully constructed to command a large audience while retaining the immediacy of an encounter with nature. Courtens' inscription, “Vogelenzang, le 10 août 92”, anchors the work to a precise moment and place, yet stands in revealing contrast to the deeply considered balance and elaborate execution of the finished composition. Its ostensible subject is almost beside the point. What Courtens paints is sensation itself: sunlight breaking through the canopy, wind rustling through foliage and reflections trembling across water, evoked through an extraordinarily free factureof greens, yellows, blues and flashes of white. Gustave De Breyne-Du Bois captured precisely this quality in 1894 as “D’un effet papillotant.”Courtens thus brought onto the grand public stage freedoms that Guillaume Vogels had done so much to establish in Belgian landscape during the preceding decade. Mare sous bois subsequently travelled through prestigious exhibitions from Munich and Antwerp to Barcelona, Copenhagen and Prague, helping establish Courtens among the most distinguished (and most expensive) Belgian painters of his generation; in Barcelona it carried the formidable price of 18,000 pesetas before eventually entering the collection of Armand Follet at Pepinster. Its magnificent original frame already accompanied the painting through this exhibition circuit and was therefore part of Courtens' intended presentation: an expensive setting of deliberate grandeur for a picture made to impress. Together, painting and frame embody the paradox of the great Salon machine: a work painstakingly constructed to make painterly freedom feel instantaneous.