SP 4958
HENRY MORET
Cherbourg 1856 - 1913 Paris
Baie de Trouville (Cotentin)
Signed lower right: Henry Moret; titled on the stretcher
Canvas: 21 ¼ x 28 ¾ in / 54 x 73 cm
Frame size: 30 x 37 in / 76.2 x 94 cm
Painted circa 1910
Provenance:
Private collection, France
To be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of Henry Moret currently being prepared by M. Jean-Yves Rolland
Although best known for his paintings of Brittany, Henry Moret here depicts the rugged coastline of his native Normandy: the Baie de Trouville and the Cotentin peninsula, at the end of which lies Cherbourg, the town of his birth. Jean-Yves Rolland dates this painting circa 1910. Moret’s last visit to the region was in 1912, the last summer of his life.
Moret’s earlier work was influenced by Gauguin, whom he met in Pont Aven in 1888. Later he developed his own personal, powerful style which fused elements of Gauguin’s Syntheticism – the power of colour to evoke emotion – with the more naturalistic approach to space and light of the Impressionists. Baie de Trouville is painted in a high key with Moret’s favourite juxtapositions of blue and green, pink and green to describe the rock formations and the shifting colours of the Atlantic. Pure touches of colour are applied fluidly, rapidly and with the rich impasto which gives such energy to his late work. This fluency of handling is the result of three decades of observation and love of the sea. The yachts and the lonely cottage are typical motifs of Moret. His landlord and friend Monsieur Tonnerre described the painter as ‘An indefatigable fishermen and huntsman, a real seadog, a first-rate shot, and yet the kindest, gentlest, most generous, the best of men’. The critic Henry Eon paid tribute to his power as a marine painter: ‘The whole work of Henry Moret was a symphony vibrating with incomparable frankness: it was the symphony of the Sea’.
HENRY MORET
Cherbourg 1856 - 1913 Paris
Henry Moret was born in Cherbourg, Normandy, the son of a garrison officer. A gentle, thoughtful man and an indefatigable worker, Henry Moret discovered Brittany during his military service in 1875. Having trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and in the studios of Gérôme and Laurens in Paris, Moret returned to Brittany in 1881, staying at Le Pouldu near Pont Aven. For the rest of his life he divided his time between Paris and Brittany, painting the landscape and rugged coastline. In 1888, while living in Pont Aven, he met Gauguin and the circle of painters who gathered around him in L’Auberge Gloanec. Moret was influenced by Gauguin’s philosophy of Syntheticism, summarized in 1890 by Maurice Denis: ‘It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’. Moret’s Breton landscapes of the early 1890s have often been mistaken for those of Gauguin. In his later work Moret re-explored the more naturalistic approach of the Impressionists, using a palette dominated by blues, greens and pinks.
In 1893 Moret fell in love with Célina Chatenet, a dressmaker who became his wife in 1910. She helped to support him financially until a contract with Durand-Ruel in 1895 freed Moret from money worries. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. In 1900 and 1902 Durand-Ruel showed his work in New York, along with that of Maufra and Loiseau. Following Moret’s death in 1913, Durand-Ruel held a number of posthumous exhibitions and in one catalogue Moret was described as having the ability ‘to express the Breton landscape exactly… he occupies a unique place in the evolution of art at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, as he has been able to fuse together two fundamentally opposing styles: the Syntheticism of Pont Aven and Impressionism’.
The work of Henry Moret is represented in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper; Southampton City Art Gallery; the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff; the Hermitage, St Petersburg; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Indianapolis Museum of Art.