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| Image | Sale date | Auction house | Location | Sale name | Lot No. | Estimate | Price Sold | Condition | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Jun 19, 2015 | Heritage Auctions | Dallas | European Art Signature Auction | 69006 | $****** - ****** | Peupliers dans la vallée du Vert |
paintings
65.7 x 96.5 cm (25.87 x 38 in)
oil on canvas
Signed lower right: Henri Martin
Private collection, Maryland Eastern Shore
Sale: Alex Cooper Auctioneers, Inc., Towson, Maryland, April 23, 2006
Private collection, Bethesda, Maryland, acquired from the above.In 1900, Henri Martin, tiring of the rat race of Paris, purchased Marquayrol, a seventeenth-century villa with farmyard near the village of Labastide-du-Vert in the Lot region of southwestern France, which served as his summer house and muse for his shimmering Post-Impressionist landscapes for over forty years. Martin painted not merely the charming house and grounds, but also the verdant environs of Labastide-du-Vert. One such example, Peupliers dans la vallée du Vert, exceptional in its large scale and pristine condition, depicts the nearby valley of the Vert River, an ideal location for his experimentation with the light effects of breeze-swept trees and water reflections. Time and time again, Martin returned to the Lot river valley as a choice subject, showing at different times of day and in different seasons the area's expansive meadows and hills and the distinctive poplar groves along the Vert.Indeed, the native poplars of Labastide-du-Vert, with their soaring, slender trunks, dense branches, and spiraling leaves, captivated Martin as a subject of beauty and as a pictorial element for ordering his compositions. He once remarked, "It enrages me to still be in Paris when the poplar leaves begin to emerge in Labastide." Like the Impressionist Claude Monet, who executed his famous poplar series in 1891, Martin painted poplars in various seasons and weather conditions, using them as a vehicle for exploring light and color. Most of his poplar paintings are vertical in orientation, some focusing up close on the colorful trees themselves, while others utilizing a row of trees as a feature along the river or as a backdrop for figures in field. Significant as a horizontal poplar canvas, Peupliers dans la vallée du Vert captures a day in early summer, indicated by the lush green foliage of the poplars and the yellow wheat field in the mid-ground, just beyond the dark line of the Vert River.Peupliers dans la vallée du Vert demonstrates Martin's moving beyond Impressionist formulae toward a Post-Impressionist interest in form and design. Here, the poplars become bold vertical shapes intersecting other geometric shapes: the triangles of the sky and hills and the horizontal bands of the meadow and wheat field. Martin flattens these shapes by unifying color within each and by employing outlines, for example, in the background purple hill and the right foreground poplar. His regular spacing of the poplar trees and horizontal bisecting of the canvas with the Vert achieve a sense of mathematical order and harmony. However, Martin energizes the carefully balanced composition through his flickering Pointillist brushwork. Indeed, the marvel of a large-scale canvas like Peupliers dans la vallée du Vert is that what appears as a grid of color fields from a distance dissolves into a kaleidoscopic color fantasia up close.We wish to thank Cyrille Martin and Marie-Anne Destrebecq-Martin for their gracious assistance in cataloguing this lot, which is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Cyrille Martin.
