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Lot Essay
Henri Martin came from the southern French city of Toulouse, where he had won the Grand Prix Municipal at the city's Ecole des Beaux-Arts. This enabled him to study in Paris, where he subsequently settled. However, Martin longed for his native landscape, and in 1900, purchased Marquayrol, a large seventeenth-century house built on a hill overlooking the picturesque village of Labastide-du-Vert in the Lot. Marquayrol became Martin's retreat from Paris and it was there that he would spend the months between May and November, delighting in the southern light that he had missed dearly. It was there that he painted Grand bassin du Parc de Maquayrol, circa 1905.
Martin cultivated an extensive garden in his beloved villa, replete with cypress-lined paths, bushes of a bright, colorful flowers, centered around a classical circular pool toped with the statue of a cupid, seen here. Martin's idyllic garden, as well as the house itself and the nearby village, provided him with an endless source of inspiration and remained his main connection with nature and light for more than forty years. It was also at Marquayrol that Martin's unique style, a synthesis of a broadly Impressionist approach combined with Pointillist brushwork, reached its maturity. "By discovering Marquayrol," Claude Juskiewenski has noted, "Henri Martin had found his equilibrium, his personal and artistic fulfillment" (in Henri Martin, exh. cat., Cahors and Toulouse, 1993, p. 103).
The present work depicts the basin where the painter spent long afternoons refining his style en plein air. The lushness of the vegetation around, all in bloom, reflected in the water, translates the pleasant feeling of heat during a bright summer’s day—one can almost hear the cicadas singing. As Martin's correspondence attests, he was increasingly compelled to capture the effect of changing seasons, and there exist scenes of Maquayrol at different times of the year, summer scenes, such as the present lot, being the most coveted.
During the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Martin painted a series of magisterial panels for the Salle Martin in the Capitole de Toulouse. They portray the cycle of the seasons set within the landscape of Labistide-du-Vert. His series of shimmering canvases of the bassin at Marquayrol, of which the present work is a particularly accomplished example, provide the more intimate counterparts to this grand public commission.
Martin cultivated an extensive garden in his beloved villa, replete with cypress-lined paths, bushes of a bright, colorful flowers, centered around a classical circular pool toped with the statue of a cupid, seen here. Martin's idyllic garden, as well as the house itself and the nearby village, provided him with an endless source of inspiration and remained his main connection with nature and light for more than forty years. It was also at Marquayrol that Martin's unique style, a synthesis of a broadly Impressionist approach combined with Pointillist brushwork, reached its maturity. "By discovering Marquayrol," Claude Juskiewenski has noted, "Henri Martin had found his equilibrium, his personal and artistic fulfillment" (in Henri Martin, exh. cat., Cahors and Toulouse, 1993, p. 103).
The present work depicts the basin where the painter spent long afternoons refining his style en plein air. The lushness of the vegetation around, all in bloom, reflected in the water, translates the pleasant feeling of heat during a bright summer’s day—one can almost hear the cicadas singing. As Martin's correspondence attests, he was increasingly compelled to capture the effect of changing seasons, and there exist scenes of Maquayrol at different times of the year, summer scenes, such as the present lot, being the most coveted.
During the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Martin painted a series of magisterial panels for the Salle Martin in the Capitole de Toulouse. They portray the cycle of the seasons set within the landscape of Labistide-du-Vert. His series of shimmering canvases of the bassin at Marquayrol, of which the present work is a particularly accomplished example, provide the more intimate counterparts to this grand public commission.