Louis ARTAN (1837–1890)

LOUIS ARTAN — Vue de plage, c. 1875–80

Although Louis Artan de Saint-Martin occasionally retained the anecdotal conventions of nineteenth-century marine painting, Vue de plage finds this founding member of the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts at his most essential and most daring. Almost everything has been stripped away: no boats, harbour or narrative incident remain, only beach, sea and an immense blue-grey sky, vigorously brushed in remarkably subtle tonal variations. A solitary wandering figure provides the principal vertical accent, exquisitely counterbalanced by a tiny flock of birds disappearing across the open sky; human presence itself appears almost incidental to the fleeting conjunction of light, air and water. This apparent spontaneity was fundamental to Artan's development. Writing in 1909, Jean de Bosschère observed that “On ne peut classer strictement les ébauches d'une part, les tableaux de l'autre”, noting that Artan's freely brushed ébauchesof the early 1870s already possessed the technique he subsequently sought to introduce into his finished pictures; some were themselves “merveilleux panneaux” to which perhaps nothing could usefully be added. Vue de plageis, in essence, just such an ébauche: abbreviated, immediate and yet entirely complete. This radical economy helps explain Artan's continuing authority among the younger avant-garde: invited to the inaugural exhibition of Les XX in 1884, he returned in 1887 with no fewer than ten works, including paintings from the collections of Mlle Anna Boch, Léon Lequime, Edmond Picard and the Van Mons family. This older painter was not retrospectively adopted by the avant-garde; they invited him into their exhibition.