Henri Duhem - Woman On A Path

Henri DUHEM
(Douai, 1860 – Juan-les-Pins, 1941)
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Woman on a path
Watercolor on paper
31x23.5 cm / 42.5x34.5 with its frame
Signed lower left "henri duhem"

At first a lawyer, Henri Duhem decided in 1893 to devote himself to his passion, painting, and led a successful career. Member of the Institute, Commander of the Legion of Honor, he exhibited with the Societe nationale des beaux-arts, the Societe nouvelle des peintres et des sculpteurs, the Aquarellistes français and he was also one of the founders of the Salon des Tuileries. Close to Henri Le Sidaner, he is one of the painters qualified as intimate, striving with realism and poetry to "express the inner life of things or beings"[1].
A landscape painter, Henri Duhem particularly celebrates the beauty of his birthplace, Douai, and of the North of France, but his travels in Belgium, Holland or Venice also provide him with motifs to paint in oil or watercolor. Here, the mountain peak on the horizon and the blue-violet luminosity evoke the edges of the lakes in Savoie, where Henri Duhem went several times. In 1904, 1906, 1912 and in 1914, he thus exhibited several watercolors of Lake Geneva at the Salon of Societe nationale des beaux-arts and at the Georges Petit gallery. He also presented to the Aquarellistes français views of Lake Annecy in 1921 and of Lake Bourget in 1922 and 1930. This watercolor is probably a view of Lake Bourget, as the mountain shape allows to identify the Dent du chat.

[1] Camille Mauclair, LAS to Maurice Denis, St Leu Taverny, undated, Departmental Archives of Yvelines, Ms 7819.