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Lot Essay
*This lot may be exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax Notice in the back of the catalogue.
In 1882, the year that Partie de campagne was painted, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec began training for entry into the École des Beaux-Arts. Each day, the eighteen-year-old painter traveled from his family's home near the Madeleine in Paris to Léon Bonnat's teaching studio in Montmartre. Lautrec's parents, Count Alphonse and Countess Adèle de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, had no objections to their son becoming a painter, even if his mother gently mocked their "budding Michelangelo" (quoted in P. Huisman and M.G. Dortu, Lautrec by Lautrec, New York, 1964, p. 66). Indeed, the members of this family cultivated a fanciful mix of artistic imagination and sporty, aristocratic values, as demonstrated by Lautrec's painting of his father on horseback wearing a Kirghiz costume, his falcon on his hand. Lautrec had been drawing since the early 1870s, following the example of his father and uncles, all of whom were amateur artists and sportsmen. "When my sons kill a woodcock" stated his grandmother, "the bird affords them three pleasures; those of the gun, the pencil, and the fork" (quoted in ibid., p. 19). In Bonnat's studio, the painter replaced the spontaneous sketches of his youth with methodical academic figure studies from life, yet the vibrancy and movement of his earliest works inevitably resurfaced in his famous images of fin-de-siècle Paris.
Lautrec painted the present work while summering at the Château du Bosc, the family's estate in the south of France. Freed from the constraints of historical and mythological canvases, the painter returned to his favorite subjects: horses, hunting, and portraits of his extended family. In the present scene, three figures and a dog rest in a golden field during a country outing. Lautrec's relatively light palette and loose brushwork counter the solid academicism of his studio training, and display instead the modified Impressionism seen in popular Salon paintings of the time. Commenting on the present work, Richard Shone has noted that the "casual disposition of the three figures (the woman in the center may well be Countess Adèle) as well as the sure handling of spatial recession, suggest considerable sophistication on the artist's part" (op. cit., p. 91). Partie de campagne also demonstrates Lautrec's openness to technical experimentation during his early artistic training. Richard Shone has written, "Even in this early painting, he has scratched into the wet paint, perhaps with the other end of his brush, to suggest dry, burnt grasses in the foreground" (ibid., pp. 91-92).
The overcast sky in Partie de campagne reflects the rainy weather that plagued the family during their stay at the Château du Bosc. In a letter that Lautrec wrote to his grandmother in August of 1882, the artist complained that they were all "living in the fog or rather the mud of the Aveyron, since it's been raining." Nevertheless, stated Lautrec, his mother and aunts went on sewing and crafting, while his cousins and uncles continued "massacring all [they] can. I am dividing my leisure time between painting and a toothache" (quoted in H.D. Schimmel, ed., The Letters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Oxford, 1991, pp. 65-66).
In 1882, the year that Partie de campagne was painted, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec began training for entry into the École des Beaux-Arts. Each day, the eighteen-year-old painter traveled from his family's home near the Madeleine in Paris to Léon Bonnat's teaching studio in Montmartre. Lautrec's parents, Count Alphonse and Countess Adèle de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, had no objections to their son becoming a painter, even if his mother gently mocked their "budding Michelangelo" (quoted in P. Huisman and M.G. Dortu, Lautrec by Lautrec, New York, 1964, p. 66). Indeed, the members of this family cultivated a fanciful mix of artistic imagination and sporty, aristocratic values, as demonstrated by Lautrec's painting of his father on horseback wearing a Kirghiz costume, his falcon on his hand. Lautrec had been drawing since the early 1870s, following the example of his father and uncles, all of whom were amateur artists and sportsmen. "When my sons kill a woodcock" stated his grandmother, "the bird affords them three pleasures; those of the gun, the pencil, and the fork" (quoted in ibid., p. 19). In Bonnat's studio, the painter replaced the spontaneous sketches of his youth with methodical academic figure studies from life, yet the vibrancy and movement of his earliest works inevitably resurfaced in his famous images of fin-de-siècle Paris.
Lautrec painted the present work while summering at the Château du Bosc, the family's estate in the south of France. Freed from the constraints of historical and mythological canvases, the painter returned to his favorite subjects: horses, hunting, and portraits of his extended family. In the present scene, three figures and a dog rest in a golden field during a country outing. Lautrec's relatively light palette and loose brushwork counter the solid academicism of his studio training, and display instead the modified Impressionism seen in popular Salon paintings of the time. Commenting on the present work, Richard Shone has noted that the "casual disposition of the three figures (the woman in the center may well be Countess Adèle) as well as the sure handling of spatial recession, suggest considerable sophistication on the artist's part" (op. cit., p. 91). Partie de campagne also demonstrates Lautrec's openness to technical experimentation during his early artistic training. Richard Shone has written, "Even in this early painting, he has scratched into the wet paint, perhaps with the other end of his brush, to suggest dry, burnt grasses in the foreground" (ibid., pp. 91-92).
The overcast sky in Partie de campagne reflects the rainy weather that plagued the family during their stay at the Château du Bosc. In a letter that Lautrec wrote to his grandmother in August of 1882, the artist complained that they were all "living in the fog or rather the mud of the Aveyron, since it's been raining." Nevertheless, stated Lautrec, his mother and aunts went on sewing and crafting, while his cousins and uncles continued "massacring all [they] can. I am dividing my leisure time between painting and a toothache" (quoted in H.D. Schimmel, ed., The Letters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Oxford, 1991, pp. 65-66).