Lot Essay
Patrick Henry Bruce painted the present work circa the fall of 1911, inspired by his intense fascination with Paul Cézanne and guidance from his neighbor, friend and teacher Henri Matisse.
The great-great-great grandson of the famed Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry, Bruce was born in Virginia in 1881 and studied art in Richmond, before moving in 1902 to study at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase. The following year in 1903, Bruce departed for Paris, where he would remain for nearly the rest of his life and quickly became a favorite of French avant-garde circles. He regularly visited Gertrude and Leo Stein and enrolled in Matisse’s school which opened in January 1908. Through visits to the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants, the latter where Bruce himself exhibited, the artist was exposed firsthand to the latest radical developments in modern painting.
In the present work, Bruce incorporates Matisse’s approach to color while exploring Cézanne’s still-life structure and paint application. Barbara Rose explains of this period of his career, "Bruce was painting in a highly assured Cézannesque style derived from Matisse...Using color contrast rather than light and shade to model form, between 1910 and 1912 Bruce began interpreting still life as a monumental subject. In Matisse's sculpture class, which Bruce also took, Matisse taught that the purpose of studying sculpture was to understand better how to present volume in painting. No one took him more literally than Bruce, who manages to give a high degree of sculptural relief to his plates of fruit and vases of flowers through the disposition of warm and cool colors arranged in ascending and descending chromatic scales, separated into individual brushstrokes, each of which represented another angled plane in space." (Patrick Henry Bruce: American Modernist, A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1979, p. 49)
The attention to angles and planes within his Post-Impressionist still lifes, including the present work, would evolve into the hard-edged geometries of Bruce’s later still lifes that are acknowledged as one of the masterwork series of early American Modernism.
The great-great-great grandson of the famed Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry, Bruce was born in Virginia in 1881 and studied art in Richmond, before moving in 1902 to study at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase. The following year in 1903, Bruce departed for Paris, where he would remain for nearly the rest of his life and quickly became a favorite of French avant-garde circles. He regularly visited Gertrude and Leo Stein and enrolled in Matisse’s school which opened in January 1908. Through visits to the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants, the latter where Bruce himself exhibited, the artist was exposed firsthand to the latest radical developments in modern painting.
In the present work, Bruce incorporates Matisse’s approach to color while exploring Cézanne’s still-life structure and paint application. Barbara Rose explains of this period of his career, "Bruce was painting in a highly assured Cézannesque style derived from Matisse...Using color contrast rather than light and shade to model form, between 1910 and 1912 Bruce began interpreting still life as a monumental subject. In Matisse's sculpture class, which Bruce also took, Matisse taught that the purpose of studying sculpture was to understand better how to present volume in painting. No one took him more literally than Bruce, who manages to give a high degree of sculptural relief to his plates of fruit and vases of flowers through the disposition of warm and cool colors arranged in ascending and descending chromatic scales, separated into individual brushstrokes, each of which represented another angled plane in space." (Patrick Henry Bruce: American Modernist, A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1979, p. 49)
The attention to angles and planes within his Post-Impressionist still lifes, including the present work, would evolve into the hard-edged geometries of Bruce’s later still lifes that are acknowledged as one of the masterwork series of early American Modernism.