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拍品專文
Executed circa 1881, Georges Seurat’s L’Hôtel des Invalides, vue d’un parapet de la Seine is a powerful example of the evocative and tenebrous atmosphere that the artist conjured in his mature drawings. Through an archway of trembling leaves, a domed architectural structure rises up against a silvery sky, while, in the foreground, a metal railing runs along the walled embankment of the river. To the right of the composition, two narrow trees loom boldly out of the deep shadows, their forked branches parallel as they project into the scene. Their strikingly vertical trunks intersect with the crisp horizontal lines of the railings, converging to create a grid-like pattern. This stark and sharp linearity contrasts with the soft, dancing strokes that form the leafy arch and distant dome, imbuing the work with an enigmatic and dramatic intensity.
Although Seurat enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts when he was eighteen, studying under the painter Henri Lehmann, he swiftly shifted away from the classicist style of draftsmanship encouraged by the famed institution. Instead of following conventional techniques of contour line drawing, Seurat rendered his subjects by means of densely-hatched masses of light and shade, running the hard tip of a jet black conté crayon across the finely textured surface of Michallet paper. The thick, hand-made paper bore an undulating surface, with grooves and furrows left from the mold in which it was made, and the artist tailored his application of the conté crayon so as to amplify and exploit this textured finish. With an acutely sensitive touch, Seurat layered strokes of pigment onto the sheet, generating tonal gradations ranging from the blackest darkness to glowing expanses of light. Seurat termed this technique “irradiation,” an approach rooted in the concept that light and dark tones mutually enhance one another as they come together, generating incomparable chiaroscuro effects.
Though the work has been titled after the Hôtel des Invalides, the art historian César de Hauke believed the distant building to be the Institut de France. L’Hôtel des Invalides, vue d’un parapet de la Seine bears an affinity with two other works on paper executed by Seurat from the same period, one in pastel, and the other also in conté crayon (De Hauke, vol. II, nos. 459 and 460). Both of these are renderings of the same domed structure on the far side of a leafy embankment, although, unlike in the present work, a gentleman leans against the wall, gazing out towards the building. These two compositions are studies for Seurat’s oil on wood painting, L’Invalide (Petit homme au parapet) (De Hauke, vol. I, no. 12), now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Given the pictorial continuity with the present composition, curators Gary Tinterow and Asher Ethan Miller have suggested that L’Hôtel des Invalides, vue d’un parapet de la Seine also played a crucial role in the development of L’Invalide (Petit homme au parapet) (in exh. cat., op. cit., 2005, p. 424).
Although Seurat enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts when he was eighteen, studying under the painter Henri Lehmann, he swiftly shifted away from the classicist style of draftsmanship encouraged by the famed institution. Instead of following conventional techniques of contour line drawing, Seurat rendered his subjects by means of densely-hatched masses of light and shade, running the hard tip of a jet black conté crayon across the finely textured surface of Michallet paper. The thick, hand-made paper bore an undulating surface, with grooves and furrows left from the mold in which it was made, and the artist tailored his application of the conté crayon so as to amplify and exploit this textured finish. With an acutely sensitive touch, Seurat layered strokes of pigment onto the sheet, generating tonal gradations ranging from the blackest darkness to glowing expanses of light. Seurat termed this technique “irradiation,” an approach rooted in the concept that light and dark tones mutually enhance one another as they come together, generating incomparable chiaroscuro effects.
Though the work has been titled after the Hôtel des Invalides, the art historian César de Hauke believed the distant building to be the Institut de France. L’Hôtel des Invalides, vue d’un parapet de la Seine bears an affinity with two other works on paper executed by Seurat from the same period, one in pastel, and the other also in conté crayon (De Hauke, vol. II, nos. 459 and 460). Both of these are renderings of the same domed structure on the far side of a leafy embankment, although, unlike in the present work, a gentleman leans against the wall, gazing out towards the building. These two compositions are studies for Seurat’s oil on wood painting, L’Invalide (Petit homme au parapet) (De Hauke, vol. I, no. 12), now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Given the pictorial continuity with the present composition, curators Gary Tinterow and Asher Ethan Miller have suggested that L’Hôtel des Invalides, vue d’un parapet de la Seine also played a crucial role in the development of L’Invalide (Petit homme au parapet) (in exh. cat., op. cit., 2005, p. 424).