Guarisco Gallery 2012

110 Henri Lebasque (French, 1865-1937) Bathers at the Fountain, St.Tropez signed, o/c 25-1/8” x 31-1/2” (36” x 42-1/2” fr.) n 1906, Henri Lebasque moved to the Midi region of southern France near the village of St. Tropez. The painters Henri Matisse, Paul Signac, and Pierre Bonnard had already relocated there a few years earlier and Lebasque followed at the urging of his friend the artist Henri Manguin. In this beautiful sun-drenched Mediterranean locale, Lebasque painted delightful colorful scenes of local life and his family at leisure. Bathers at the Fountain, St. Tropez, completed the same year, demonstrates Lebasque's use of the colorful and expressive palette of the Fauves and the vivacious bravura brushwork of the Impressionists. The bather as a subject is a major theme throughout the history of Western art. Bathers appear in early Renaissance depictions of biblical stories and as nymphs and goddesses in the Academic tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Impressionists alsochose the subject of the bather, most notably Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cezanne. The Post-Impressionist painter Henri Lebasque explored the theme of the bather out-of-doors in several of his paintings executed in the south of France during the early decades of the 20th century. Henri Lebasque ew points in the history of Western art have experienced such a dramatic convergence of so many artistic developments as that which occurred during the late—19th and early—20th centuries in Paris. The Post-Impressionist painter Henri Lebasque was exposed to such revolutionary artistic movements as Impressionism, Pointillism, and Fauvism, and incorporated different elements from each to create a body of unquestionably individual work that appealed to both critical and popular taste during his lifetime. Lebasque spent the early part of his career in contact with important figures of the artistic avant-garde. His associations with the Impressionist Camille Pissarro and the Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat influenced both his technique for applying paint and his understanding of color. Although Lebasque eventually abandoned the meticulous points and dabs of the Pointillists, the concept of visual mixing of complementary colors placed next to one another remained a central idea through his career. Lebasque also encountered and befriended the painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, who were known as Intimistes for their quiet scenes depicting the private domestic sphere of the late 19th century. A friendship with Henri Matisse led to Lebasque's involvement with the Fauves or "Wild Beasts," whose flat shapes and planes of boldly contrasting colors he greatly admired. Consistent with all of his exposure to and experiments with various styles and movements of fin-de-siècle Paris, was Lebasque's manner of selecting certain aspects and facets of different movements and adapting them to his own personal mode of visual expression. [ Museums: Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Nat. Mus. of W. Art, Tokyo; Musée de Petit Palais, Geneva] F I