Henry Lerolle (1848 – 1929) Still Life With Apples

Henri Lerolle delivers here an impressionist still life with a comma-like touch and a modern layout.

Oil on panel
Monogrammed HL lower right
Dimensions: 27 x 22.5 cm

The apple with multiple symbols, very often represented in painting.

For a very long time, from the Middle Ages to the present day, the apple has been represented in painting. It is the symbol of earthly life, its pleasures and excesses, of the passing of time, of the fragility of matter, the brevity of life. Artists have loved to paint this fruit in a very pure, graphic and colorful form.
Cézanne himself proclaimed "With an apple, I want to amaze Paris!"

Henri Lerolle, an impressionist and timeless still life

Henri Lerolle delivers us a modern and timeless still life. No basket, no basket, the two-tone red-yellow apples are simply arranged on the grass. The painter works with a comma-like touch the material of the fruits but also that of the grass on which they rest.

Biography

Henry Lerolle, Impressionist painter, trained at the Académie de Charles Suisse and then entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studio of Louis Lamothe. He made his debut at the Salon of 1868.
He exhibited regularly at the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, where he received numerous distinctions, including a gold medal in 1900.
Henry Lerolle surrounded himself with artists whose works he collected, musicians, and writers such as Degas, Monet, Renoir, Maurice Denis, and Gustave Moreau.

An amateur violinist and composer, it was through his wife, Madeleine Escudier, that he was introduced to contemporary music. He became friends with Claude Debussy and established relationships with Henri Dupais, Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky. His two daughters married the sons of his friend, the industrialist and collector Henri Rouart. They posed for Edgard Degas, Renoir, Maurice Denis and Albert Besnard.

Henry Lerolle executed numerous mural decorations, often of religious inspiration. One of his first works was, in 1874, the Baptism of the Martyrs of Créteil which decorated the chapel of the baptismal font of the church of Saint-Christophe de Créteil.

He presented at the Salon of 1878 a monumental easel painting, Communion of the Apostles, commissioned by the City of Paris for the Parisian church of Saint-François-Xavier. In 1888, he executed another monumental painting, Communion, again for Saint-François-Xavier, today preserved in the sacristy.
He moved on to mural painting in 1896 with his Calvary on the walls of the chapel of the Dames-du-Calvaire, in the Jeanne-Garnier medical center, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris.

Bibliography

• Gérard Schurr, Pierre Cabane, Dictionary of the Little Masters of Painting, 1820-1920, Vol. II, Paris, Les Editions de l'amateur, 1996.
• Value of Tomorrow, Les Éditions de L'Amateur, Volume V

Museums

• In Paris: Museum of Modern Art; The Petit Palais.

• In the provinces: Carcassonne, Mulhouse, Nice, Orléans, Le Havre.

• Internationally: . New York, Metropolitan Museum, . Boston, Minneapolis, . Bucharest, . Budapest; National Museum,

Source
https://www.henrylerolle.org