Maurice Denis (1870-1943)
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Maurice Denis (1870-1943)

Jeux d'enfants

Details
Maurice Denis (1870-1943)
Jeux d'enfants
each with the Montereau factory mark (on the reverse)
seven ceramic tiles
each 4 x 4 in. (10.1 x 10.1 cm.)
Executed circa 1900-1902 (7)
Provenance
The artist's family.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the 1980s.
Literature
Exh. cat. La Céramique Fauve - André Metthey et les peintres, Musée Matisse, Nice, 1996 (illustrated p. 18).
Exhibited
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Die Nabis: Propheten der Moderne 1888-1900, May - August 1993, no. 198 (three tiles illustrated in the catalogue p. 376); this exhibition later travelled to Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Nabis 1888-1900, September 1993 - January 1994.
Special notice
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

Lot Essay

Claire Denis will include these tiles in her forthcoming Denis catalogue raisonné.

Maurice Denis executed these tiles as prototypes for the decoration of a sideboard located in his dining room in Le Prieuré in Saint-Germain en Laye. Although these particular tiles were not used in the final work, altogether thirty-two such tiles were placed on top of the sideboard.

The subject of the tiles Jeux d'enfants was dedicated to the artist's then two-year-old daughter, Bernadette, who is shown in various scenes playing with a cat. She was born in 1899, suggesting a date of the present tiles and the sideboard, as Claire Frèches-Thory has pointed out, of about 1900-1902. The style of these intimate works clearly recalls Denis's earlier work as a Nabi. The palette is reduced to essentially three colours: ochre, blue, and red. The ceramics are arranged in such a way that the narrative tiles are separated by others showing just a blue lozenge, the leitmotif of the series, which Denis used in other works, such as La cuisinière, of 1893 (private collection).

Jeux-d'enfants was not the first sideboard that the artist had embellished with ceramics. Previously, in 1898, he had decorated in a similar fashion another sideboard, together with the ceramicist Georges Rasetti (1851-1938), for his friend the musician Ernest Chausson (1855-1899). Today that work is in the Musée du Prieuré. Though Denis's collaborator on Jeux-d'enfants is not documented, Dominique Maurice-Denis has suggested that it was the ceramicist André Metthey, with whom the artist made several vases thereafter.

The tiles are a wonderful example of Denis's sense of decoration and his interest, in common with all the Nabis, in art playing a greater role in and a strong impact on daily life.


(Fig. 1) Maurice Denis, Jeux d'enfants (Buffet décoré de céramiques), circa 1900-1902. Private collection.
©ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

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