Henri Eugène Augustin Le Sidaner who was a contemporary of the Post-impressionists, was an intimist painter known for his paintings of domestic interiors and quiet street scenes. His style contained elements of impressionism with the influences of Édouard Manet, Monet and of the Pointillists discernible in his work. Le Sidaner favoured a subdued use of colour, preferring nuanced greys and opals applied with uneven, dappled brushstrokes to create atmosphere and harmony. A skilled nocturne painter he travelled widely throughout France and Europe before settling at Gerberoy in the Oise countryside. Le Sidaner's paintings and pastels were widely collected throughout his career. His seductive views of the gardens he created in the ruins of the medieval fortress at Gerberoy, with their recently vacated tables dappled in sunlight and overhung by roses, have cemented his reputation as a unique artist.
Early years
Henri Le Sidaner was born August 7, 1862 at Port Louis in Mauritius, where his Breton parents Jean Marie and Amélie Henrietta were living. His father Jean Marie was a merchant sea captain whose business took the family back to France in 1872The remainder of his childhood was spent in Dunkerque where he attended the Collège et Lycée Notre Dame des Dunes and where he met and befriended Eugène Chigot who was to become a lifelong friend and supporter. He showed great aptitude for painting, in which he was supported by his parents, and attended art classes with a teacher who had been a pupil of Philippe-Jacques van Bree.Le Sidaner’s portfolio was adjudged good enough for the city of Dunkerque to award him a scholarship and in 1880, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Paris and the prestigious École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In Paris he studied under Alexandre Cabanel, one of the most influential teachers of belle époque French painting. Although Cabanel generally painted in an academic style, that were dismissed derisively as L'art pompier by some critics, he possessed a deep knowledge of nineteenth century French art, in particular of En plein air painting and the naturalism of the Barbizon School. According to his biographer Le Sidaner saw Manet's final exhibits at the at the Paris Salon and was deeply reflective at what he saw in the modernist Manet's work. The result was that Le Sidaner resigned from Cabanel's school, on the grounds of artistic differences. Le Sidaner’s interests in the use of colour, softness of form and in painting in the gloaming light were formed during this period as he sort an artistic cure in naturalism and En plein air painting.
The Colonie artistique d'Étaples
In 1883 he returned to the Cote d'Opal where he joined fellow artist Eugène Chigot at Étaples to established an artists’ workshop and regular exhibitions that would eventually develop into a school of art, called the Villa des Roses. Étaples had a tradition of en plain air painting established by Charles-François Daubigny, who retreated there from the outbreak of the Paris Commune in 1871 and of the localDeauville painter Eugène Boudin, a leading post impressionist. In the late nineteenth- century numerous artists were drawn by the sand dunes, the atmospheric light and the remnants of an older France. In particular artists from the United States, Australia and the British Isles settled around Étaples in a loose collective. Most left at the outset of Great War in 1914 as Flanders became part of the Western Front. Le Sidaner stayed at Étaples for twelve years studying mainly on his own away from the febrile atmosphere of Paris where differing art movements were in conflict. In 1887 he sent his first painting to the Paris Salon and the following year La Promenade des Orphelines, one of his most effective early paintings, was also accepted. La Benediction De La Mer exhibited in 1890 is a prime example his early period. It is a realist painting with distinctly religious undertones. It is nostalgic and sentimental and the scene is set against an ethereal, atmospheric sky.After 1895 he eschewed this style completely likely destroying the final two paintings of the series. Le Sidaner's landscape paintings of the period reveal a fascination with the effect of light changes on the sensibilities, particularly at dusk. He began working in tonal, pastel colours and used a lighter palette to create moonlight landscapes. In this Le Sidaner was influenced by the work of Jean-Charles Cazin, an older artist from the Pas-de-calais who became known for his views of uninhabited streets, sometimes illuminated by a single light. Le Sidaner used the same motif many times in the course of his career.
Bruges
Following a move to Bruges in 1898, where he eloped with his future wife, he developed the more personal brand of melancholy that was to make his name. In the nocturne he found an effect of light sidelined by Impressionism, and made it his own, becoming a master of twilight and darkness, often with a solitary light shining through a window. Marcel Proust's mention of Le Sidaner's work in his novel In Search of Lost Time confirms its later reputation. In Sodom and Gomorrah, the narrator mentions that an eminent barrister from Paris had devoted his income to collecting the paintings of the "highly distinguished" but "not great" Le Sidaner.
Biography
Camille Mauclair , Henri Le Sidaner, The Obolous Press, Newmarket, Ontario, Canada.
Yann Farinaux- Le Sidaner, Le Sidaner, L’Oeuvre peint et gravé, Éditions André Sauret, Monaco.
