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Lot Essay
These monumental architectural panels - also known as Le Tabac and Les Allumettes – were to earn Lutterbach-born painter Jean-Jacques Scherrer considerable attention when exhibited at the 1900 opening of the Seita pavilion of the Manufactures nationales de Tabacs, the Exposition Universelle, Paris. Scherrer had, by 1900, already enjoyed a distinguished career as a painter, having exhibited annually, to frequent acclaim, at the Paris Salons since 1898. The year following the exhibition of his works at the Exposition Universelle, he was to receive the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.
The works originally decorated the external corners of the fin-de-siècle monument, designed for the Exposition Universelle by A. Chancel - architect of the Elysée Palace - whilst the interior featured a series of watercolours by Scherrer, illustrating processes and pastimes associated with tobacco, from the époque Louis XV to the present.
Each of magnificent large scale, the panels created for the exterior of the pavilion marked a stylistic departure for the artist, whose previous subjects reflected the then-prevailing fashion for neoclassical or allegorical subjects. By contrast, these two figures celebrated a powerful yet sensual liberty that struck resonance with the increasing fashionability of the Art Nouveau movement that was beginning, by 1900, to become embedded in French Art, design and architecture. The panels were created for Seita, a state-owned company that produced both tobacco products and matches. Facing left, the figure of 'La Gitane' depicts a gypsy dancer, her breast and jewelled arm exposed suggestively, her hair ornamented with wild flowers and vines. At her feet, tobacco boxes and a hookah pipe offer reason for her relaxation. By contrast, the right-facing figure of Liberty, as goddess of fire, with flaming torch in one hand, and an axe to splice timber in the other, delivers the energy of naked fire. Beyond her flaming red mane, a stylised sunrise invokes clear reference to the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholi's figure of Liberty, delivered only a decade earlier to the city of New York. Scherrer's two panels for Seita endure not only as proficient paintings in their own right, but are important and early examples of the alliance between artist and manufacturer that was to define the expansion of advertising at the dawn of the twentieth century.
The works originally decorated the external corners of the fin-de-siècle monument, designed for the Exposition Universelle by A. Chancel - architect of the Elysée Palace - whilst the interior featured a series of watercolours by Scherrer, illustrating processes and pastimes associated with tobacco, from the époque Louis XV to the present.
Each of magnificent large scale, the panels created for the exterior of the pavilion marked a stylistic departure for the artist, whose previous subjects reflected the then-prevailing fashion for neoclassical or allegorical subjects. By contrast, these two figures celebrated a powerful yet sensual liberty that struck resonance with the increasing fashionability of the Art Nouveau movement that was beginning, by 1900, to become embedded in French Art, design and architecture. The panels were created for Seita, a state-owned company that produced both tobacco products and matches. Facing left, the figure of 'La Gitane' depicts a gypsy dancer, her breast and jewelled arm exposed suggestively, her hair ornamented with wild flowers and vines. At her feet, tobacco boxes and a hookah pipe offer reason for her relaxation. By contrast, the right-facing figure of Liberty, as goddess of fire, with flaming torch in one hand, and an axe to splice timber in the other, delivers the energy of naked fire. Beyond her flaming red mane, a stylised sunrise invokes clear reference to the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholi's figure of Liberty, delivered only a decade earlier to the city of New York. Scherrer's two panels for Seita endure not only as proficient paintings in their own right, but are important and early examples of the alliance between artist and manufacturer that was to define the expansion of advertising at the dawn of the twentieth century.