Maurice Denis
Maurice Denis
‘Jardin du couvent’ was painted at the height of Maurice Denis’ Nabis period. A founding member of the group - alongside Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard - the artists were unified in their use of plasticity, simplification of form and belief in a painting having atmospheric intensity. Taking elements of Symbolism, ethereality was key, and the depiction of emotion was of greater importance than reality.
Denis was first influenced by Symbolism after seeing an 1887 exhibition of the work of Puvis de Chavannes at Galerie Durant-Ruel. He described how “I found the decorative, calm and simple appearance of his paintings very beautiful: the colours admirably suited to murals: in the pale tones the harmonies are marvellous… the sober, ethereal composition surprises me: it must stem from prodigious knowledge. It is this which created in the soul such a gentle and mysterious impression of repose and elevation”.
In ‘Jardin du couvent’ Denis employs the Nabis techniques of pure colour, simplification of form and distortion of perspectival illusion so as to draw attention to the surface of the canvas. The pattern-like trees reference the bold composition of Japanese wood-block prints which had deeply inspired Denis and many other artists before him such as Monet, Renoir and Degas. The Nabis regularly met to discuss Japanese prints, with Van Gogh organising an exhibition dedicated to them at café Le Tambourin, Paris in 1887. These long trunked trees also recur in some of Denis’ most important paintings, ‘The Muses’ for example, painted a year earlier and now in the collection of Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Denis’ paintings from the 1890s are highly prized with a number now in such museums as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (‘Springtime’, c.1894-9), Musée d’Orsay, Paris (‘Paysage aux arbres verts’, 1893), Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (‘The Visitation’, 1894).
Provenance
Estate of the artist
Dominique Denis
By descent from above until 2001
Galerie Berès, Paris (acquired from the above in 2002)
Private Collection (purchased from the above)
Private Collection, USA
Christie’s New York, 13 November 2015, lot 1290
Private Collection, Russia (acquired at the above)
Sotheby’s London, 27 February 2019, lot 370
Private Collection, Europe (acquired at the above)
Christie’s, Paris, 22 October 2021, lot 376
Exhibitions
Paris, Le Barc de
Boutteville, Peintres impressionnistes et
symbolistes, 1895, no.39 (titled Jardin
du couvent sous la neige)
(Probably) Béziers, salle Berlioz, Exposition
de la Société des Beaux-Arts de Béziers, April - May 1902, no. 27
Rome, Académie de France, Villa Medici, Debussy
e il simbolismo, 1984, no. 58
Marcq-en-Baroeul, Fondation Septentrion, Autour
de Gauguin à Pont Aven, 1985, no. 22, illus.
Gand, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Museum van Deinze en de Leiestreek &
Deurle, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Une rare
plénitude, les artistes de Laethem-Saint-Martin 1900-1930, 2001, p. 66, no.
73 (titled Le Jardin du couvent sous la
neige), illus.
Literature
M. Komanecky & V. Fabbri Butera, The Folding Image: Screens by Western Artists of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Yale University Art Gallery, Washington D.C., 1984, p. 150
This work is accompanied a letter of attestation that it will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by Clarie Denis and Fabeienne Stahl, under number 892.0005 and dated 6 November 2004