Lot Essay
Czanne's Fillete, a small and charming genre picture of a girl seated in a arched niche that is filled with sunlight and toys, has been consistently dated by scholars to the early 1870s. Yet it bears little relation to the artist's better-known work of this pivotal period in his oeuvre; there are no signs of the compelling, dark fantasies or tumultous landscapes that immediately preceeded it, and neither does it suggest the artist's new interest by 1872, and under the tutelage of Camille Pissarro, in landscape and painting sur le motif. Only its brightened palette and fluid brushwork would seem to argue for its placement at the very outset of Czanne's Impressionist years. [Indeed, if it were completely painted from life, it would be an exceptional figural work in this period.] However, throughout his career, Czanne continued to explore the realm of genre painting, drawing on a vast range of earlier art as well as his own figure studies, and the results, even on the small scale witnessed here, can broaden our understanding of his achievement.
Although Czanne's growing preoccupation with landscape in the early 1870s reflected the interests of many of his peers, genre painting continued to predominate at the annual Salons, and pictures of children were plentiful. In the same period, even Monet and Renoir contributed graceful images of children in gardens or verdant parks, surrounded with toys. Yet Czanne's painting lacks the easy spontaneity of their efforts: its perfectly symmetrical composition (the thin vertical and arching curve of the tree at left finds its mirror in the niche and hanging objects at right), the tender, melancholic attitude of the young girl, and the pointed color accent of the red ball in the foreground, all suggest a source in a previous work (perhaps a popular print or a romantic genre image) for Fillette. In its sweet and gently downcast pose, the figure also bears some resemblance to the woman in Czanne's La partie de pche (Rewald no. 245) of 1873-1874, which derived from Czanne's study of eighteenth-century rococo ftes. However, when he returned to the subject of a young girl at the very end of his life, in his Fillette la poupe (Rewald no. 896) of 1902-1904, painted, as Rewald suggests on his terrace at Les Lauves, the result was not a genre image but a likeness that was an "unusually cheerful canvas of great vibrancy "
Although Czanne's growing preoccupation with landscape in the early 1870s reflected the interests of many of his peers, genre painting continued to predominate at the annual Salons, and pictures of children were plentiful. In the same period, even Monet and Renoir contributed graceful images of children in gardens or verdant parks, surrounded with toys. Yet Czanne's painting lacks the easy spontaneity of their efforts: its perfectly symmetrical composition (the thin vertical and arching curve of the tree at left finds its mirror in the niche and hanging objects at right), the tender, melancholic attitude of the young girl, and the pointed color accent of the red ball in the foreground, all suggest a source in a previous work (perhaps a popular print or a romantic genre image) for Fillette. In its sweet and gently downcast pose, the figure also bears some resemblance to the woman in Czanne's La partie de pche (Rewald no. 245) of 1873-1874, which derived from Czanne's study of eighteenth-century rococo ftes. However, when he returned to the subject of a young girl at the very end of his life, in his Fillette la poupe (Rewald no. 896) of 1902-1904, painted, as Rewald suggests on his terrace at Les Lauves, the result was not a genre image but a likeness that was an "unusually cheerful canvas of great vibrancy "