The Weitzenhoffer Collection Label Book

Aaron M. and Clara

Weitzenhoffer Collection Label Text

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Cover: Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands, 1853–1890) Portrait of Alexander Reid [detail], c. 1887 Oil on panel, 16 1/2 x 13 1/4 in.

Facing: Childe Hassam (U.S., 1859–1935) Good Harbor Beach, Gloucester [detail], 1909 Watercolor and gouache on paper, 8 7/16 x 11 7/16 in

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art The University of Oklahoma

Aaron M. and Clara

Weitzenhoffer Collection Label Text

Introduction In 2000, the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma received the Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection, one of the most significant collections of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism given to a public university. The collection includes paintings, works on paper, and decorative arts from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Installed in a facsimile of the Weitzenhoffer’s home in Nichols Hills, the installation is a reminder that art is often intended for the domestic sphere, and the museum gallery is a relatively recent development in the history of art.

Collecting became a passion for Clara. Born to Irma and Henry Rosenthal, she married Aaron in 1938, the founder of Davon Oil Drilling Company. The collection began with Francis Wheatley’s Harvest Dinner (1792), which Clara purchased in 1949 to complement the Georgian furniture in her home. Within a few years, her taste turned to French painting and especially Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. She purchased frequently from the David B. Findlay Galleries in New York City and often reframed the paintings with antique eighteenth-century frames from Guttmann Picture Frame Associates, Inc. The collection grew rapidly in the 1950s; for example, Clara purchased three significant paintings in 1957 for her private collection: Claude Monet’s Le Berge à Lavacourt (1879), Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Alexander Reid (ca. 1887), and Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Roses (1878), which was her personal favorite.

Clara’s son Max Weitzenhoffer, a Tony Award-winning Broadway producer, a 1962 University of Oklahoma alum, and donor to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, convinced Clara to leave the collection to the museum. As Max recalled, “My parents’ good fortune made it possible for my mother to acquire these works of art, which gave her so much pleasure during her lifetime. For her, this bequest was a way of giving something back to Oklahoma and its people, a way of saying thank you. My mother could also see what a strong new commitment to the arts the university was making, and wanted to advance it in this very special and important way.”

The bequest is an excellent example of the development of modern French painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This publication provides an added educational resource for exploring and understanding this invaluable collection, for which the museum and the university are grateful.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Pierre Bonnard

(France, 1867–1947) Still Life with Teapot (Nature morte à la théière), 1936–37 Oil on canvas, 15 1/ 4 x 18 1/4 in.

For much of his career, Pierre Bonnard found inspiration in the intimacy of daily life. Both Bonnard and his colleague Édouard Vuillard earned the moniker Intimistes for their longstanding interest in domestic interiors. The appeal of domesticity originated in their work from the 1890s during their affiliation with Les Nabis. For Bonnard, the charm of the home only intensified after 1925, when he purchased a house he named Le Bosquet (The Grove) in the southern town of Le Cannet. Much of his work thereafter focused on his home, whether images of his wife Marthe or still lifes such as Nature morte à la théière.

Nature morte à la théière follows the tendencies of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac by using prismatic dabs of paint to describe the kitchen still life. Bonnard, who adopted the tenets of Neo-Impressionism in his early career, maintained his commitment to Pointillism for much of his life. He hoped to capture the luminosity of the scene before him, and the collected objects seem to shimmer as a result of his animated application of paint. The artist created a delight for the eye in the disparate forms and colors of the teapot, fruit, pitcher, table, and chair, and he once described his paintings as “the transcription of the adventures of the optic nerve.” In that regard, he also challenged the viewer’s visual acuity by cropping the pitcher, table, and chair at the edge of the canvas, as though those objects exist beyond the peripheral vision.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Eugène Boudin

(France, 1824–1898) People on the Beach (Personnages sur la plage, Trouville), 1866 Watercolor on paper, 5 5/8 x 10 7/8 in.

By the 1860s, the fishing village of Trouville-sur-Mer in Normandy had become a popular resort for the French aristocracy and bourgeoisie thanks to the expansion of railway service that allowed Parisians to reach the village in approximately six hours. The popularity of the resort drew the attention of a number of artists, particularly Eugène Louis Boudin, who favored the skies and waters of the Normandy coastline. Boudin’s father had been a maritime pilot, and the artist developed a fascination for the seascapes of seventeenth-century Dutch Old Masters early in his career. Personnages sur la plage, Trouville, however, demonstrates more interest in the fashionable tourists who sit under colorful umbrellas to watch the waves and the distant sailboats. Flags of various nations fly at right in recognition of Trouville’s status as an international destination.

Boudin often painted en plein air, and he almost certainly produced this watercolor of beachgoers on the spot, given its spontaneity and the annotations he placed in the composition.

His improvisational approach, his attention to subtle details of light and atmosphere, and his interest in modern life earned the sympathy of the Impressionists. He would participate in the first exhibit of the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs (Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers) in 1874, later known as the first exhibit of the Impressionists, although he never officially joined the group.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Mary Cassatt

(U.S., 1845–1926) Sara in a Dark Bonnet Tied under Her Chin, c. 1901 Pastel on paper, 21 x 16 1/4 in.

As the only American to be included in the Impressionist exhibitions, Mary Cassatt helped to create a taste for the style in the United States and fostered important ties between American collectors and the Impressionists. The daughter of a Pittsburgh banker, Cassatt spent most of her adult life in France and enjoyed success in both Europe and North America. Her friendship with Edgar Degas led to her inclusion in the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, as well as those in 1880, 1881, and 1886.

Like Degas, Cassatt favored the human form and preferred portraits of female sitters, especially mothers and children.

Sara in a Dark Bonnet Tied under Her Chin is a portrait of the granddaughter of Emile-Francois Loubet, a former President of the French Republic. Cassatt’s pastel straddles the boundaries of sketch and finished portrait. While Sara’s face and bonnet are fairly resolved with a delicate handling of the pastel, Cassatt only roughed in her body and background with a demonstrable immediacy. Cassatt used pastel primarily to sketch prior to the late 1870s but thereafter began creating drawings she considered complete even when the work was seemingly unfinished.

Her signature in the upper right attests to her intent to see the work as resolved, even though it is likely a preparatory work for the painting Sara in Dark Bonnet with Right Hand on Arm of Chair, ca. 1901 (private collection). Sara posed for more than 50 drawings and paintings, and the artist clearly appreciated something in the girl’s countenance or cheerful personality.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

(France, 1796–1875) Cows Resting at the Foot of Cool Hills (Le Repos du vacher au pied des fraiches collines), ca. 1855–65 Oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 24 1/ 8 in.

The Forest of Fontainebleau became a popular retreat from urban life for upper and middle class Parisians in the 1830s and a source of inspiration for a group of painters known as the Barbizon School, so named for a nearby village. Although the Barbizon School formed loosely in the 1830s, it was not until the 1850s that they received recognition at the Salon, the official government art exhibition. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot served in the Salon jury in 1849 and soon thereafter became one of the leading figures of the group.

Corot favored atmospheric, tonal scenes painted directly from nature, or en plein air. In paintings such as Cows Resting at the Foot of Cool Hills, he began with a light gray ground to create the subtle luminosity for which he was later acclaimed by the Impressionists. He also mixed white with his colors to achieve the effect of natural light. This landscape may have been drawn in part from Fontainebleau, though it likely depicts the Roman countryside.

The tower in the background compares to that of a medieval fortification now part of the Palazzo Ruspoli in Nemi. Corot had been visiting the area since his first Italian sojourn in the 1820s, and Cows Resting at the Foot of Cool Hills follows a venerable tradition of pastoral Italian landscapes initiated by French artists such as Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.

Like those two artists, Corot juxtaposes a quiet scene of country life with the lingering relics of the past, which encourages the viewer to contemplate both the peace of country life and the transitory nature of civilizations.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Edgar Degas

(France, 1834–1917) Dancer at the Bar (Danseuse à la barre), c. 1885 Charcoal with pastel and white chalk on paper, 12 1/ 4 x 9 1/ 2 in.

Impressionist Edgar Degas is arguably best known for his numerous paintings and drawings of ballerinas. He produced more than 100 life drawings in the early-to-mid-1880s, and the vast majority remained in his studio until his death to be used in future paintings and sculptures as references to the poses and gestures. This pastel Dancer at the Bar (Danseuse à la barre) was clearly intended as a study, yet Degas cropped the ballerina’s right arm and left foot in the manner of a photograph, which was one of the hallmarks of Impressionism. Dancer at the Bar also demonstrates the nature of Degas’s process as he repeatedly refined the position of the right arm and leg and annotated the drawing with the phrase “plus noir la jambe” (“more black the leg”).

Degas’s attention to draughtsmanship and his concern for anatomy were largely the result of his training. Born into an aristocratic family, Degas abandoned the pursuit of a law career to attend classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and studied privately under Louis Lamothe, a pupil of the Neo-classical artist Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. In his academic study with Lamothe, Degas recognized the value of line and developed an appreciation for the integrity of form, and he could be critical of his fellow Impressionists for their abstract sensibilities.

Committed as he was to the depiction of modern life, Degas continued to find value in academic principles, as he clearly demonstrated in Dancer at the Bar.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Raoul Dufy

(France, 1877–1953) The Beach of Sainte Adresse (La Plage de Sainte-Adresse), 1905 Oil on canvas, 18 1/ 8 x 21 5/ 8 in.

In 1905, Raoul Dufy encountered the work of Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and others at the Salon d’Automne, Paris’s fall exhibition of contemporary art.

Dubbed les Fauves, or the “wild beasts” by critic Louis Vauxcelles, the artists used riotous, non-representational color and abstract form, while building on the earlier examples of Vincent van Gogh and Les Nabis.

Although Dufy had won a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1900, he disliked the academy and embraced abstraction after his visit to the Salon d’Automne. Dufy was drawn, in particular, to Matisse’s painting Luxe, Calme, et Volupté (1904; Georges Pompidou Center, Paris) and began to experiment in paintings such as La Plage de Sainte-Adresse. The beach at Sainte-Adresse, located near Dufy’s native Le Havre in the region of Normandy, was a popular tourist destination and a favorite subject of Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet, both of whom had influenced Dufy in years previous. The familiar locale offered Dufy an opportunity to focus primarily on a new technique emphasizing an expressive handling of paint and color.

He pared down the figures on the promenade to essential forms, although it is still possible to identify a nurse pushing a stroller, and reduced the features of the beach to swaths of varied color. Warmer colors like orange and red advance toward the viewer, while the cooler colors retreat, creating a sense of topography and recessional space. For Dufy, the subject was little more than a vehicle for the manipulation of color and form. As he would later argue, “the subject itself is of no account; what matters is the way it is presented.”

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Raoul Dufy

(France, 1877–1953) Paddock, n.d.

Oil on canvas, 23 1/ 2 x 28 3/4 in.

Horse racing enjoyed widespread popularity in the 1930s, and artist Raoul Dufy was among those drawn to the races at Deauville, Longchamp, and Chantilly in France and Epsom Downs and Ascot in England. The pomp surrounding the races often interested the artist more than the sport itself and, in his painting Paddock, strolling couples in formal dress admire the thoroughbreds on display as a jockey likely departs for the track.

Dufy used a new stylistic approach in these paintings he called couleur-lumière, which conveys impressions of light through the application of expressive and often non-representational color. Color, in his paintings of this period, represents light and its absence implies shadow.

Because Dufy often focused on the most brilliant colors in a given scene, the result appears as a patchwork of primary and secondary colors accentuated with dark, calligraphic contours that he used to define the forms. Dufy’s aesthetic choices imbue Paddock with a lighthearted and jovial atmosphere.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

André Dunoyer de Segonzac

(France, 1884–1974) Still Life (Nature morte), n.d.

Watercolor on paper, 18 1/4 x 15 1/2 in.

This still life likely dates after the 1930s, during the years of André Dunoyer de Segonzac’s greatest acclaim. In the mid-twentieth century, Segonzac exhibited internationally and won numerous awards for his work. He frequently exhibited with both the Fauves and the Cubists in the early 1900s, yet his style, which borrows from sources as diverse as Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse, does not fit comfortably into any category. In this still life, Segonzac uses simple contour drawing and washes of color to construct the forms of the blossoms and the glass and ceramic wares. He draws attention to the artifice of his watercolor through the floral decoration on the white vase, and insinuates that his representation is a decorative play of line and color not dissimilar from the embellishment on the vessel.

Segonzac began painting still lifes in the 1920s, especially after his purchase of a villa in Saint-Tropez in 1925. His naïve approach to form is the result, in part, of his lack of training.

Although he studied in the Free Academy of Luc-Olivier Merson in the early 1900s, Segonzac was never formally admitted, and later he attended the Académie de la Palette briefly. He considered his studies largely irrelevant to his career and found recognition early, exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne in 1908 and the Salon des Indépendants in the following year.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Jean-Louis Forain

(France, 1852–1931) The Dressing Room (La Loge), c. 1890 Pastel and gouache on paper 18 7/ 8 x 11 3/4 in.

Known widely for his quick wit, Jean-Louis Forain excelled at satire and produced illustrations for notable journals such as Le Figaro and Le Courrier Français.

He moved in both artistic and literary circles with close friends such as painter Edgar Degas, poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, and writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. Degas influenced Forain’s artistic work considerably and arranged for the latter’s inclusion in the fourth Impressionist exhibit in 1879 and the subsequent three.

By 1890, Degas had achieved acclaim for his images of ballerinas, and Forain’s The Dressing Room (La Loge) may be a subtle jab at his mentor’s elegant images of the performers. Forain’s ballerina reaches behind her back as if unclasping her bodice for her well-dressed suitor, and the screen at right infers the act of undressing, though the modesty and propriety usually promised by such a screen seems to have little role in this transaction. A matronly attendant, presumably acting as chaperone as well, sleeps at left. The wealthy man may be a subscriber, which not only entitled him to backstage access but also promised intimate encounters with the performers. Men such as this could act as “protectors” by providing money and gifts to ballerinas, who often earned meager wages, in exchange for sexual favors. Given the lascivious scrutiny of this subscriber, he may be examining a new performer prior to entering into such a relationship. Forain heightens the eroticism and aggressive nature of the interaction through the blood red floor, which also emphasizes the ballerina’s legs so often unseen in society because of the large bustled skirts demanded by the decorum of the period.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Paul Gauguin

(France, 1848–1903) Winter Day, 1886 Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 x 22 in.

Formerly, though erroneously, titled Copenhagen, this painting, Winter Day (also known as Suburb under Snow), may be Paul Gauguin’s submission to the eighth Impressionist exhibition. He began showing with the Impressionists in 1879 at the fourth group exhibition but became dissatisfied with the style in 1886 during his sojourn in Pont-Aven, a commune in the region of Brittany on the northwest coast of France. In this respect, Winter Day is among his final Impressionist paintings.

The influence of Camille Pissarro, who taught Gauguin informally beginning in 1883, is particularly evident in this snow scene. Pissarro, as well as Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, enjoyed the effets de neige, or effects of snow, and Gauguin followed, using the snow and cloudy sky in Winter Day as a vehicle for the exploration of color. Variations of red, blue, yellow, orange, and green are visible throughout the painting, and Gauguin invites the viewer to stroll down the path already occupied by others to enjoy the subtle colors of winter. The location depicted in this painting is unknown, and the original attribution to Copenhagen, likely made by his estranged wife Mette-Sophie Gad, is unlikely, since Gauguin lived in Paris in 1885-86. Unless he painted from memory, Gauguin probably based this scene on one of the nearby suburbs of Paris, which were easily reached by expanded rail service. It may be nearby Vaugirard or Pontoise, where Gauguin had lived in previous years, although it is also possible that he fabricated the landscape from various locations with which he was familiar.

Shortly after the creation of this painting, Gauguin relocated to Pont-Aven and then to Tahiti in 1891, where he produced the work for which he best known. He applied the expressive color and line he developed in Pont-Aven to his overtly mystical depictions of Tahitian culture, and he preferred the “primitive” culture of the islanders to the complications of Western civilization.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Armand Guillaumin

(France, 1841–1927) Still Life (Nature morte), c. 1885 Oil on canvas, 7 1/ 2 x 9 1/ 2 in.

Armand Guillaumin began his studies at the Académie Suisse in 1861, where he met both Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne.

He began painting views of the Seine with an emphasis on light and color and later took part in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Guillaumin would participate in five of the remaining seven Impressionist exhibitions.

In the 1880s, he responded to Post-Impressionism by intensifying his palette and experimenting with new approaches to form, as with this still life inspired by the work of Cézanne.

The latter began painting still lifes of apples in the late 1870s as a means of working out new techniques he hoped would reconcile the two-dimensionality of painting with the perceived three-dimensionality of the world around him. Apart from close friends such as Guillaumin, few others knew about Cézanne’s approach until the 1890s.

Cézanne explained his theories in a letter to fellow artist Émile Bernard and encouraged him to “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.

Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth... lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth.

But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.” Guillaumin likely received the same encouragement. He paints the apples as spheres and uses planes of color, oriented towards a central point in the composition, to give the appearance of three-dimensionality. He also reduced his palette primarily to red and yellow to create the impression of solidity. Cézanne claimed, “with an apple I will astonish Paris,” and his new approach to painting would have a lasting impact beyond Guillaumin and other close colleagues.

Although Guillaumin did not paint solely in the style of Cézanne, he remained interested in innovative techniques and devoted himself to painting exclusively after he won the state lottery in 1891. He also followed the example of Vincent van Gogh at times, and Vincent’s brother, Theo, represented Guillaumin.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Childe Hassam

(U.S., 1859–1935) Good Harbor Beach, Gloucester, 1909 Watercolor and gouache on paper, 8 7/16 x 11 7/ 16 in.

Impressionism came to the United States more than a decade after the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, but, by the early 1890s, the style had achieved widespread popularity among American artists and collectors.

Childe Hassam would become one of the most influential American Impressionists after adopting the style in 1887. Originally from Boston, he had worked as a commercial draftsman and illustrator before attending the AcadĂŠmie Julian from 1886 to 1888. He relocated to New York City in 1889 and was elected an Academician in the National Academy of Design in 1906.

Thereafter, Hassam enjoyed commercial and critical success for his images of New York City and the New England countryside. Like other artists of his day, he was drawn to the numerous art colonies of the region, including the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire, Old Lyme and Cos Cob in Connecticut, and Gloucester on Cape Ann in Massachusetts. He painted Good Harbor Beach, Gloucester during a visit to the latter in September 1909. Using a spare palette, he laid in areas of relatively unmodulated color to define the forms of the beach, the figures, and the boats that line the spit of land in the foreground. He left significant areas of the paper unpainted in order to focus solely on passages of reflected light. His technical approach, in this respect, suggests some familiarity with the Divisionism of Paul Signac and other Neo-Impressionists. Although Hassam maintained his interest in Impressionism for the remainder of his career, he flirted with abstraction occasionally during the 1910s and after, and Good Harbor Beach, Gloucester may be an early experiment with aesthetic alternatives.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Claude Monet

(France, 1840–1926) Riverbank at Lavacourt (La Berge à Lavacourt), 1879 Oil on canvas, 23 1/ 2 x 35 1/ 4 in.

Parisian Claude Monet traveled often to the coast of Normandy beginning at the age of 18, and it was there he met Eugène Boudin, who inspired him to become an artist. Monet then attended the Académie Suisse in Paris and later studied with Charles Gleyre in the 1860s, where he met his future peers in Impressionism Jean-Frédéric Bazille, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Monet’s early experiences with Boudin gave him an appreciation for plein air painting, and the additional example of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot encouraged the four aspiring artists to continue their study in the Forest of Fontainebleau.

Monet, together with his three colleagues, would develop the style eventually know as Impressionism from their experiences at Fontainebleau. At the first exhibit of the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs (Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers) in 1874, Monet exhibited his painting Impression: Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris), a study of the perceptual effect of the rising sun on the hazy atmosphere of the port at Le Havre, Monet’s hometown. The title of Monet’s painting, as well as his roughly sketched representation of forms, led critic Louis Leroy to deride the entire show as “The Exhibition of the Impressionists,” prompting the artists to eventually adopt the term to describe their group.

Critical and financial success eluded Monet for much of the 1870s, and the changes modernity brought to Paris and its suburbs encouraged him to settle in Vétheuil in 1878, a small rural village further downriver on the Seine. His paintings of this period largely ignore industrialization and urbanization in favor of a countryside that had remained unchanged for centuries, and he frequented the quaint hamlet of Lavacourt situated on the left bank of the Seine opposite from Vétheuil. His Riverbank at Lavacourt (La Berge à Lavacourt) is likely derived from a plein air study. Monet used abbreviated brushwork for the foliage and longer strokes for the path and the background to urge the viewer alternatively to dwell on the details of the landscape or to meander visually. The painting depicts the towpath along the river, which would have been used to tow boats from the shore when conditions interfered with sailing. Monet had little interest in boat traffic, however, and focused exclusively on the tranquility of the surrounding landscape. He encourages the viewer to take the path at left into the countryside, where two figures stand at the river. The houses at left underscore Monet’s interest in a peaceful existence in the natural world, free of the turmoil of modernity.

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Camille Pissarro

(France, 1830–1903) Apple Trees in a Meadow at Éragny (Pommiers dans le Pré à Éragny), 1894 Oil on canvas, 25 3/8 x 32 in.

The peace of rural life drew many of the Impressionists to the country including Camille Pissarro, who settled in Éragnysur-Epte near the Oise River in 1884. The commune was largely agricultural and had scarcely 500 inhabitants when Pissarro relocated. He painted Apple Trees in a Meadow at Éragny (Pommiers dans le Pré à Éragny) from the window of his studio, a converted barn. Pissarro sought a contemplative spirit in many of his works, especially later in life, and the female figure in the foreground provides a means by which the viewer may inhabit the greening meadow, populated only by an orchard of apple trees and a small herd of cattle. Nestled in the thicket beyond, the smaller village of Bazincourt-sur-Epte appears on the horizon. The painting represents the retreat from the urban world that Pissarro sought later in life and a continuation of the pastoral tradition Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot initiated in French modern painting.

Pissarro executed Apple Trees in a Meadow at Éragny in his late Impressionist style with thick, abbreviated strokes of paint representing the effect of light on forms. Pissarro had been a mentor to many of the Impressionists and showed in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions, but he became dissatisfied with the style in the 1880s and began experimenting with the scientific leanings of Neo-Impressionism, also referred to as Pointillism and Divisionism, after meeting Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in 1885. By the time Pissarro moved to Éragny-surEpte, he returned to Impressionism, believing that the style could express his vision of the natural world and already having digested the lessons of Neo-Impressionism.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Camille Pissarro

(France, 1830–1903) Nude with Swans, c. 1895 Gouache on paper, 8 1/ 2 x 6 1/ 2 in.

In 1893, Camille Pissarro proposed in a letter to his son Lucien a series of nude bathers, though he was well aware of the possible impropriety in asking the reserved population of Éragny-sur-Epte to pose. The series, which would span three years and include diverse media, responded to an artistic tradition dating to the Renaissance, but one still practiced by modern artists, including one of Pissarro’s disciples, Paul Cézanne.

Pairing a nude female bather with a bevy of swans also may have been intended as a subtle allusion to the myth of Leda and the Swan, in which the Greek god Zeus took the form of the waterfowl to seduce and then rape Leda, queen of Sparta and mother to Helen of Troy. Cézanne gave the myth erotic treatment in the early 1880s, following earlier precedents set by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo but, if Pissarro intended a reference to the myth, he preferred a more sedate, indirect interpretation. The swans flutter as they swim nearby the bather, who begins to dress having emerged from the stream. Pissarro painted Nude with Swans in opaque watercolor or gouache (pronounced “gwahsh”), and built his forms from dark to light with a crosshatch of linear strokes that invest the painting with a palpable energy. Although Pissarro may have intended the gouache as a study for a later oil, no extant painting exists.

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Camille Pissarro

(France, 1830–1903) Nude with Swans, c. 1895 Lithograph, 6 1/ 2 x 5 1/ 4 in.

Camille Pissarro was a prolific printmaker and produced hundreds of etchings and lithographs over the course of his career. As his vision worsened in later years, preventing him from painting en plein air, he turned to printmaking and purchased his own press in 1894. This lithograph, Nude with Swans, is based upon the gouache of the same name in the Weitzenhoffer Collection and belongs to his series of bathers produced between 1893 and 1896. Lithography, literally “stone (litho) writing or drawing (graph),� was developed at the end of the eighteenth century and was the most widely used print medium in nineteenth-century France for illustrating books, periodicals, and newspapers. Using a waxy crayon, Pissarro drew his forms on the stone in a sketchy manner that imparted some of the same energy visible in the gouache. Pissarro then exposed to stone to acid, which etched the surface save for those portions protected by the crayon. The subsequent relief created on the stone could be used to print the image.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Odilon Redon

(France, 1840-1916) Carnations (Les oeillets), n.d.

Pastel on paper, 23 x 20 in.

Odilon Redon is considered one of the leading exponents of the artistic and literary movement known as Symbolism, which expressed ideas through enigmatic and often complex metaphors.

He won the admiration of his peers in the 1880s with his Noirs (Black Ones), a loose series of charcoals and prints characterized by a dark atmosphere and haunting subject matter. His association with the French avant-garde and his friendship with Armand Guillaumin secured him a place in the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 and may have led him to experiment with colorful oils and pastels in the early 1890s.

After 1900, Redon turned to a series of floral still lifes using the vivid coloration he had previously applied to his Symbolist works. He employed passages of color to compose his forms, largely ignoring line and shading, except when necessary to establish space. In the pastel Carnations (Les oeillets), a flourish of red, pink, and white help to define the blossoms of the pink carnations, and additional touches of color complete the bouquet: yellow dots create the impression of mimosa, dashes of blue suggest corn flower, and touches of red may represent salvia or some kind of berry. Redon focused on the flowers and vase to the exclusion of all else and, despite limited gray shading to provide relief, the still life exists in an undefined and somewhat unreal space. The artist devoted much of the remainder of his career to floral imagery, and his use of brilliant colors and abstract form would have a formative influence on Henri Matisse, who collected several of the pastels.  

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir

(France, 1841–1919) Young Woman in the Country: Portrait of Madame Henriot, the Actress (Jeune Femme dans les champs), 1877 Oil on canvas, 28 5/ 8 in x 16 7/ 8 in.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted Young Woman in the Country: Portrait of Madame Henriot, the Actress (Jeune Femme dans les champs) outdoors or en plein air, and took care to record the variations in light and shadow that dapple both his model and the surrounding landscape. The painting lacks the brilliant palette common to his paintings of this period and a fair amount of raw canvas is exposed, suggesting that it may have been an experiment or sketch, yet Renoir signed the canvas, indicating it is a finished work. In subsequent decades, numerous artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Signac used paint economically, and left exposed canvas in order to draw the eye to the paint and the salient details of the subject.

Renoir’s model, actress Madame Henriot or Marie-Henriette-Alphonsine Grossin (1857-1944), posed for him repeatedly during the 1870s. After her study at Le Conservatoire national de musique et de declamation, she began her stage career while still a teenager and struggled during the 1870s to find some success. Eventually, she became a regular performer at the Théâtre de l’Odéon and the avant-garde Théâtre Libre. In Young Woman in the Country: Portrait of Madame Henriot, the Actress (Jeune Femme dans les champs), Madame Henriot is at the beginning of her career at age 19, yet Renoir still idealized her features to create a youthful, coquettish appearance. She poses in a lush, fertile country landscape, almost as a personification of spring, and entices the viewer by placing a finger flirtatiously against her lip. Renoir associates sexuality with the exuberance of nature as if to recall earlier allegories by Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, but with a technique decidedly modern.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir

(France, 1841–1919) Les Roses, 1878 Oil on canvas, 16 3/ 8 x 13 1/ 4 in.

At the age of 13, Pierre-Auguste Renoir began working as a porcelain painter to help support his family.

He demonstrated natural talent for painting the floral still lifes and ornamental patterns that decorated the porcelain wares, and he developed his talents further by copying Old Masters paintings at the Louvre. In 1862, he attended classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and also studied independently with Charles Gleyre. He met aspiring artists and future Impressionists Jean-Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Alfred Sisley during this time. They shared a mutual interest in painting modern life, contrary to the academic penchant for history and mythology, and favored an interpretation of nature that emphasized movement and changes in light and atmosphere. To capture these changes, Renoir and his colleagues used a wet-on-wet technique, painting layer over layer before the medium dried and often mixing colors directly on the canvas.

Renoir used this approach in Les Roses, evident in the fluid application of paint on the blooms, tablecloth, and varied colored background. He mixed the paint generously with turpentine to give the paint the desired viscosity and worked energetically, emphasizing the seeming spontaneity of his brushwork. His subject matter harkens back to his early days as a porcelain painter, though most academic painters regarded still lifes as merely decorative and lacking in intellectual merit. Given the uncertainty of his early career, Renoir painted still lifes intermittently after the 1870s and turned his attention to the figure. He achieved success after several paintings were accepted to the 1879 Salon and exhibited rarely with his fellow Impressionists, fearful of tarnishing his recent success.

Renoir became a favorite of Clara Weitzenhoffer, and she purchased three additional paintings for her permanent collection. She considered Les Roses the finest painting in her entire collection.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

(France, 1841–1919) Coco (Claude), c. 1905 Oil on canvas, 9 1/ 2 x 10 in.

Claude Renoir (1901-1969), nicknamed “Coco,” was the third and youngest son of artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Coco was born when the artist was 60 and quickly became his father’s favorite model, replacing his older brother Jean. Pierre-Auguste painted his youngest son regularly, as if tracing his age. In this study, Coco is roughly four years old and wears his hair long with a ribbon on the right side of his head, following the fashion for young boys at the turn of the century. He rests his elbow on a table, reading a book before him. Renoir filled the remaining canvas with additional studies of Coco’s face as well as a single chrysanthemum in the upper right.

Renoir executed a finished painting of Coco reading in 1905, which is currently in the collection of the Maison de Renoir, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. The youngest son went on to an influential career as a film and television producer, following his eldest brother Pierre, a popular character actor, and Jean, who became a celebrated filmmaker. After his retirement, Claude began a career as a ceramicist with his son Paul.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir

(France, 1841–1919) Chrysanthemums, n.d.

Oil on canvas, 11 x 10 in.

Although Pierre-Auguste Renoir was widely esteemed as one of the fathers of Impressionism, he believed he had exhausted its possibilities by the early 1880s and began a close study of the Old Masters. He looked especially to the examples of Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jean-Antoine Watteau for guidance and developed from his study a vivid palette and feathery, downy brushwork. Renoir considered his work of this period some of his best, claiming in 1913 that “I’m starting to know how to paint.” He turned again to floral still lifes in part because rheumatoid arthritis had begun to restrict his movement around the turn of the twentieth century. His Chrysanthemums belongs to this later period of his career. Renoir painted floral arrangements largely drawn from the blossoms around his home at Cagnes-sur-Mer in southern France.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Henri Rousseau

(France, 1844-1910) Street in the Suburbs (Rue en Banlieue), c. 1896 Oil on canvas, 20 1/ 2 x 23 1/ 2 in.

Loan, A. Max Weitzenhoffer Henri Julien Félix Rousseau settled in Paris in 1868 and worked first as a bailiff and then as a toll collector at the city limits.

In his spare time, he learned to paint by studying works at the Musée du Louvre and the Musée du Luxembourg, among others.

Rousseau never received formal training in anatomy, perspective, and color theory, which resulted in a naïve and otherworldly quality in his paintings. His work drew the attention of Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac, and other members of the Parisian avant-garde, who found his paintings to be emotionally and spiritually sincere and unadulterated by the artifice of academic training. Signac invited Rousseau to exhibit at the unjuried Salon des Indépendants in 1886 and, by the mid-1890s, the latter was widely known among the avant-garde as “Le Douanier” or “The Customs Officer,” a nickname given him by the writer Alfred Jarry.

Having been born in the rural Laval, Rousseau found artistic interest in the countryside and the quiet suburbs of Paris. Rue en Banlieue depicts a nearly deserted street, save for a sole individual who appears to be clearing and burning debris. Rousseau’s interest in this scene seems to have been the architecture, the lines of which are slanted by a flawed perspective. Rousseau reduced the façades of the buildings to simple planes yet emphasized small details such as the individual leaves on the nearby trees. In turn, the painting possesses an airless, dreamy quality that would later influence Surrealism, an art movement that sought to express the unconscious through imaginative imagery. Although Rousseau never found critical or public acceptance during his lifetime, he won the admiration of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and other modern artists and writers, and his example helped to create an appreciation for folk or outsider artists.

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Paul Signac

(France, 1863–1935) Coast Scene, 1893 Oil on canvas, 18 1/ 2 x 22 in.

Critic Félix Fénéon coined the term Neo-Impressionism to describe the new stylistic tendencies in the work of Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, and Paul Signac. The artists exhibited their recent experiments at the first Salon des Indépendants in 1884, a non-juried exhibition founded by Seurat and Signac, and then later at the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886.

The Neo-Impressionists had departed from the improvisational quality of Impressionism by separating color into individual touches of pigment, an approach called Divisionism. Relying on the optical theories of Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood, Seurat and Signac believed the viewer’s eye would blend the individual colors, an effect they referred to as mélange optique (optical mixing), while the separated passages of paint would seemingly shimmer, especially when applied in meticulous dots. Both Seurat and Signac preferred that approach, which came to be known as Pointillism, and the latter insisted that “the separated elements will be reconstituted into brilliantly colored lights.”

Signac’s style is apparent in the methodical application of dots and blanched palette of Coast Scene. The artist applied paint only when necessary to create the forms and colors of the scene, leaving a generous amount of unpainted canvas. Despite the economy with which Signac painted, the individual passages of color merge when viewed from a distance to create an animated yet tranquil scene of sailboats along the French Riviera. Signac relocated from Paris to Saint-Tropez in 1892 and sailed the Riviera frequently. The topography of the scene is almost certainly Saint-Tropez, which was already becoming a tourist destination by this time.

When Seurat died prematurely in 1891, Signac became the chief proponent of the movement and later published its theories in the 1899 book, From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism.

Signac believed Neo-Impressionism to be the logical extension of French painting in the nineteenth century and would continue to practice the style, even as the example of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin pushed painting in a less formulaic direction.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

(France, 1864-1901) Portrait of a Girl, 1892 Oil on canvas, 11 3/ 8 x 9 1/ 2 in.

In 1892, Henri de ToulouseLautrec received a commission from a patronne (madam) to decorate a maison close (brothel) on the rue d’Amboise, where he was currently a resident, with portraits of 16 of the establishment’s prostitutes. Portrait of a Girl, taken together with the other 15, provided clientele with some idea of the features of the individual prostitutes, and Toulouse-Lautrec emphasized her beauty and fashion, though his expressive rendering in the complementary colors of red and green may not have been entirely helpful in that respect.

Toulouse-Lautrec painted an illusionistic gold frame around each of the medallion-shaped portraits to harmonize with the interior of the brothel, which was housed in a converted seventeenth-century Parisian palace with rococo decorations and Louis XV furniture. He reportedly painted flower garlands and other ornaments around the portraits, which drew a parallel between the operations of the brothel and the pretentions of eighteenth-century aristocratic life as though both were equally decadent. The room was eventually dismantled in the years following World War I. Residing at a brothel was not unusual for Toulouse-Lautrec, despite belonging to an aristocratic family. Toulouse-Lautrec was particularly attracted to depicting the underside of Parisian life, including brothels and nightclubs. He inherited a bone disease that stunted the growth of his legs and, following a series of injuries, he was left disabled. In 1899, he was briefly institutionalized, and he suffered a fatal stroke in 1901.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Maurice Utrillo

(France, 1883–1955) Flowers, n.d.

Oil on canvas, 13 x 9 1/ 2 in.

Artist Maurice Utrillo is arguably as famous for his troubled life as his paintings. Born to painter Suzanne Valadon out of wedlock, Utrillo and his mother lived in the bohemian community of Montmarte, a district in Paris that drew artists and writers, in part, for its numerous cafés and cabarets such as the infamous Moulin Rouge. Utrillo developed a problem with alcohol by 1899 and, in 1903, he was encouraged to paint as a form of therapy for his addiction. He achieved some early notoriety for his street scenes of Paris produced with an expressive brushstroke and a bright palette, but it was his inclusion in the Salon d’Automne in 1909 and the Salon des Indépendants in 1912 that helped to secure his reputation as a member of the avant-garde. Throughout the 1910s and ‘20s, Utrillo struggled with alcoholism, and some of his most productive periods coincided with his confinement in asylums. He sold his paintings to pay his mounting medical bills.

While detained in an asylum, Utrillo looked to popular postcards of Paris for inspiration, but still life also provided easy subject matter. This image of carnations in a blue vase is undated but characteristic of the naïve approach found in Utrillo’s early work. A heavy contour bounds the forms, save for the blossoms, which Utrillo painted exuberantly. The painting conveys the appearance of spontaneity, as though Utrillo executed the painting based on an immediate emotional response.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Vincent van Gogh

(Netherlands, 1853–1890) Portrait of Alexander Reid, c. 1887 Oil on panel, 16 1/ 2 x 13 1/ 4 in.

Alexander Reid aspired to a career as an artist but ultimately became a dealer for the international firm Goupil & Cie. He met Vincent van Gogh in London in the 1870s and, when Reid relocated to Paris for business in 1886, he shared an apartment with Vincent and his brother Theo, who worked for the same firm. Reid left the apartment in the winter of 1887 after his relationship with Vincent deteriorated, possibly because Reid refused to organize an exhibition of Impressionism in London.

Reid posed for Van Gogh twice, and this painting is one of the few full-length portraits that Van Gogh completed during his career. The two men bore a striking resemblance, and this painting has often been confused for a self-portrait of Van Gogh. It is also the only surviving image of the apartment that Vincent shared with Theo, although apart from a few furnishings, the painting provides little information. Most notably, on the wall behind Reid, one of Van Gogh’s portraits of peasant women painted a few years prior hangs in the center, flanked by two paintings by American artist Frank Myers Boggs, both of which were gifts from the American.

Reid poses somewhat tensely in the foreground, leaning forward in an armchair, and Van Gogh used animated brushwork, inspired by Impressionism, and an expressive palette in the complementary colors of orange and blue. The artist’s subjective, often spiritual, interpretation of nature was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, especially in the use of complementary colors, defined contours, and a tilted spatial perspective.

In subsequent years, Van Gogh’s brushwork and colors became more lively and his space more dynamic, in part because of his friendship with Paul Gauguin. The two moved to Arles in 1888 and entered the most experimental phase of their respective careers. Van Gogh’s emotional instability and frequent disagreements led to Gauguin’s departure soon after. Van Gogh spent most of the following year in a mental institution before committing suicide.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Maurice de Vlaminck

(France, 1876–1958) The Seine at Chatou River Scene (La Seine à Chatou), c. 1910 Oil on canvas, 20 3/ 4 x 25 1/ 4 in.

Maurice de Vlaminck, along with his colleagues Henri Matisse and André Derain, formed the core of the group known as les Fauves, so named by critic Louis Vauxcelles, who saw their work beside a traditional bust at the Salon d’Automne in 1905 and claimed it was like seeing Donatello among “les fauves” or the “wild beasts.” Vlaminck was a self-taught painter and met Matisse in 1901 while sharing a studio with Derain in Chatou, a commune northwest of Paris and also Vlaminck’s hometown. Les Fauves exhibited together loosely beginning in 1905 and, although the group did not disband until 1910, the last major exhibition of their work was held at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907.

That same year, Vlaminck attended a retrospective of the work of Paul Cézanne at the Salon d’Automne. Under the spell of Cézanne, Vlaminck moved away from the intense color combinations of his Fauve paintings towards a reserved, somber palette and a greater emphasis on the careful construction of form. The Seine River at Chatou provided the vehicle for Vlaminck’s investigations and, in La Seine à Chatou, he reduces the foliage and buildings of the scene to simple, almost geometric shapes constructed by heavy black contours and broad, planar strokes of paint. Chatou seems quiet in the painting, though it had become a popular destination for Parisians by this time, especially among those interested in rowing.

The prominence of the river in the composition may allude indirectly to the popular sport, which often figured in his earlier Fauve paintings of the scene, yet Vlaminck was far more interested in translating his perception of the Chatou landscape into Cézanne’s technique.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Maurice de Vlaminck

(France, 1876–1958) Landscape, n.d.

Watercolor on paper, 21 1/ 2 x 25 1/ 2 in.

In the later decades of his career, Maurice de Vlaminck looked to the quiet streets of French villages for inspiration. He produced small watercolor sketches, such as this one, fairly quickly and as potential studies for later oils. He used an economy of line to define the forms of the architecture and broad washes of color as reminders of his impressions of the scene.

Although the location is unidentified, this sketch may have been painted in Vlaminck’s home in Chatou, which is notable for the red roofs of the buildings.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Edouard Vuillard

(France, 1868–1940) Marie Holding a Bowl, 1891 Oil on board, 9 3/ 8 x 6 3/ 4 in.

In 1890, the Salon des Indépendants, an exhibition free of both juries and prizes, provided the first venue for a group known as Les Nabis. Derived from the Hebrew word for “prophets,” Les Nabis was composed of a group of students given to mysticism and dissatisfied with the academies. They embraced the style Paul Gauguin had developed in the late 1880s in Pont Aven and looked to his disciple Paul Sérusier as a mentor. The style they developed, known as synthetism, abstracted forms to flat, planar areas of vivid color, thus synthesizing visual experience and emotional engagement to create something entirely new.

Les Nabis attracted a number of artists, including Édouard Vuillard. The artist met several of the future members at Lycée Condorcet during his study there in 1884-85, and later at the Académie Julian between 1886-88.

During the years of Vuillard’s affiliation with Les Nabis, he worked on a small scale and tested the limits of representation by composing his images of nearly uniform color. This painting of his sister Marie relies on simplified forms and broad areas of color to compose the image.

Vuillard adapted a formal approach used by Gauguin known as cloisonnism, in reference to the decorative metalworking technique of cloisonné. Although Vuillard did not define his forms with dark contours in the cloisonnist manner, his use of relatively flat color follows that of Gauguin. Marie Holding a Bowl is less a portrait of the artist’s sister than an experiment with color and form as the basis of picture-making.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Edouard Vuillard

(France, 1868–1940) Woman in a Green Hat, 1892 Oil on board, 8 1/ 2 x 6 7/ 8 in.

Japonisme, the influence of Japanese art and culture on that of France, shaped the work of numerous artists in the late nineteenth century, including Les Nabis. The woodblock prints of Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige enjoyed wide popularity among the avant-garde, and French artists borrowed the asymmetry, flat planes of color, and curvilinear patterns found in the prints. Les Nabis, like their contemporaries, looked to Japanese woodblocks for inspiration, especially Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, who shared a studio in Montmartre in the early 1890s. Woman in a Green Hat employs the formal characteristics of Japonisme in the patterning of colors and lines and in the asymmetrical balance weighted towards the left side of the composition.

The painting employs the conventions of portraiture but seems less concerned with a record of the sitter’s likeness than the formal values. In this respect, Woman in a Green Hat provides visual support for the argument made in 1890 by Maurice Denis, Vuillard’s colleague in Les Nabis, who contended that “a picture… before being a war-horse, a nude woman, or some sort of anecdote… is essentially a surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.”

For Vuillard, even the unpainted sections carried visual weight and contributed to the value of the composition.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Edouard Vuillard

(France, 1868–1940) Birches at l’Etang-la-Ville (Bouleaux à l’Etang-la-Ville), 1896 Oil on cardboard, 7 1/ 2 x 10 in.

Located west of Paris, the small commune of l’Étang-la-Ville became home to a member of Les Nabis Ker-Xavier Roussel and his wife Marie, sister of fellow Les Nabis member Édouard Vuillard. Vuillard spent numerous summers there in the 1890s and painted the local environs repeatedly by using the decorative style he developed during that decade. He reduced much of this view of a garden path to basic forms of relatively undifferentiated color, save for the lively grove of birches. The distinctive bark and foliage of the trees offered Vuillard the opportunity to play with line and pattern, and the trees seem to sway and move as if under the influence of the breeze. The path invites the viewer to stroll visually through the manicured landscape and appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of the natural world.

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Edouard Vuillard

(France, 1868–1940) Madame Hessel and Lulu in the Dining Room at the Chateau des Clayes (Madame Hessel et Lulu dans la salle a manger des Clayes), c. 1935-38 Pastel on paper, 30 5/ 8 x 31 5/ 8 in.

Images of women and children in domestic interiors held ongoing interest for Édouard Vuillard, although he remained a lifelong bachelor. His close friend, confidant, and rumored lover, Lucy Hessel, became one of his favorite muses. This large pastel depicts Lucy and her daughter Lulu in the Château des Clayes, a home the Hessels purchased in 1925 outside of Paris and near Versailles. Lucy’s husband, Jos, was a partner in the prominent firm Bernheim-Jeune that represented Vuillard and much of the French avant-garde of the day, and the château interior, decorated with modern art, attests to the family’s livelihood.

The décor also speaks to Vuillard’s earnest belief in the creative bond between the fine and applied arts and to his long association with mural projects, which were designed to decorate and beautify modern interiors. During Vuillard’s affiliation with Les Nabis, he developed an appreciation for pattern and color as the primary means of organizing a composition, and this pastel testifies to the longevity of those interests. Like his earlier work, much of this pastel is dominated by relatively unmodulated fields of color, yellow and peach in this case, which are broken only by the dark, sketchy lines used to define the figures and objects of the interior. After 1900 he worked on a larger scale and created a greater sense of recessional space.

Vuillard clearly relished in this interior and others, a tendency he shared with his colleague Pierre Bonnard, and his bright, rich colors create an inviting mood of elegance and intimacy.

Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection

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Francis Wheatley

(England, 1747–1801) Harvest Dinner, 1792 Oil on canvas, 26 x 20 1/ 4 in.

In Harvest Dinner, a group of peasants pause from the grain harvest to enjoy a meal under the shade of an arbor. The painting conveys a harmonious existence in which the bounty of the farmlands produces the food and liquor now enjoyed by the men, and the mob caps worn by the women in the foreground, when taken together with their rolled sleeves, suggests the informality of the fields. Rural scenes became increasingly popular in the Georgian society near the turn of the nineteenth century, as the English sought respite from the rigors of industrial and urban life. The nobility desired the pleasures of a country existence, as popularized in the novels of Jane Austen and others, and artists such as Francis Wheatley produced somewhat idyllic scenes of rural labor for the gentry. Like Austen, however, there is little suggestion in Harvest Dinner of the poverty and undesirable living conditions faced by the rural lower classes.

Wheatley exhibited Harvest Dinner at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1792, the principal academy in England, where the painter had been among the first class in 1769.

Clara Weitzenhoffer began her collection with this painting, partly because she had begun to acquire eighteenth-century English furniture for her home in Oklahoma City’s Nichols Hills neighborhood.

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Learn More Unless otherwise indicated, all works included herein belong to the 2000 Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer bequest.

Learn more about the Weitzenhoffer Collection online at fjjma.ou.edu.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art The University of Oklahoma fjjma.ou.edu 555 Elm Ave. Norman, OK 73019-3003