HENRI LEBASQUE (1865–1937)

Private collection, France (acquired in 1985 by the current owner’s father and subsequently passed down through the family)

‘The painting style of a sensitive artist like Lebasque changes according to the atmospheric conditions in which he finds himself. Rapid and jagged when capturing the violent flashes of daylight from outside, it becomes calmer and more enveloping indoors. Here we find once again the generous swathes of paint characteristic of his later style, as seen in Sainte-Maxime and Les Andelys, for example; yet he takes care to let the light glide more gently over these fresh complexions, over these new blooms spread out before him, whose velvety texture, pearly sheen and milky blond tones enchant him and renew his palette. Robust at times and always sincere, he knows how to make a vivid splash of colour burst forth, to make pure tones sing, just as he knows how to model true forms, without sentimentality or insipidity.

One senses the air circulating around his models—the air that bathes the luminous interiors of the Mediterranean coast, the light that streams through closed shutters or wide-open windows onto lush greenery or harmonious horizons; one also senses the truth of the forms, which remain individual, sometimes blossoming in a golden, voluptuous natural setting that Rubens would have loved, sometimes more slender and more energetic, as in this large figure reclining on a leopard skin—one of the last and most important pieces in the series—or in this other figure crouching, head on her knees, in an unexpected arabesque, before a pink sofa. Here again is the same young woman emerging from the bath, draped in her orange dressing gown with black patterns that opens invitingly, whilst another female figure walks away through an open door beside her, dressed in a light blue dress that sets off her fair complexion. It is undoubtedly she who, a moment ago, was lying more languidly on the sofa, half-undressed, or who, completely naked, rested with her arms crossed above her head, basking in the caress of the rays of light streaming through the open window, or who, climbing onto the armchair on her knees, gazing out of the window at the distant hills, offered to the eye the abundant sight of a voluptuous derrière.

With this very free and luminous series, we are as far removed as possible from the academic nudes frozen by the memory of the Greco-Roman model or by the dry, linear and soulless study of the studio model. Lebasque’s sensitivity blossoms here in complete freedom; his joy in painting the resplendent light of nature is evident here; he has not been touched by the bitterness and the sort of disenchantment that emanate from too many contemporary nude paintings, where the artist, by dint of pursuing an implacable truth in form and colour, lapses into a base and trivial materialism. Standing before his radiant nudes, one is reminded of the dazzling, sensual poems of Rubens, whose power he does not, admittedly, match, but whose voluptuous and monotonous exaggeration he avoids; one is also reminded of the delicate visions of our 18th-century French painters, who had a singular fondness for such pearly freshness, but who often, Boucher in particular, lapsed into the formulas of a sort of gallant academicism. It is true and simple nature that unfolds here unreservedly, yet without immodesty, without bawliness or innuendo; and it is the mastery of a born colourist that asserts itself in complete freedom, without system or formula, with a concern for harmonies and melodious combinations that are particularly delightful. ”

Paul Vitry, Henri Lebasque, Paris: Georges Petit and Henri Floury, 1928, pp. 174–184

• Henri Lebasque (1865–1937), Nude with a Fruit Bowl, oil on canvas, signed lower left, 65 × 100 cm, unsold. Sale: Impressionist & Nineteenth-Century Art, Christie’s, New York, 13 May 1999, lot 176
• Henri Lebasque (1865–1937), Still Life with Pomegranates, oil on canvas, signed lower left, 42 x 55 cm, unlisted. Sale, Modern Paintings & 20th-Century Decorative Arts, Audap & associés, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 26 June 2025, lot 11

This work is part of a series of nudes, painted around 1925–1926, featuring Alice Prin (1901–1953), known as “Kiki” or “Kiki de Montparnasse”. Denise Bazetoux says of these nudes that they “bear no resemblance to studio models”. To achieve this result, she explains that the painter “observes his models moving freely before him, then chooses the pose or movement that pleases him in order to produce one or more sketches, and finally the finished painting. […] The blonde Marinette, a model he shared with Bonnard, his neighbour in Le Cannet, and Kiki, the brunette, were thus depicted time and again, moving about or resting in sun-drenched interiors, on a terrace—with an open window, behind closed shutters, on the beach...”