Henri Lebasque (1865 - 1937) — Two Nudes

Two nudes
Watercolor on paper, studio stamp lower right.
21 x 33.50 cm

Certificate of authenticity from Madame Lenoir, great-granddaughter of the artist.

Between the Nabis and the Fauves, the balance of a sensitive gaze

Henri Lebasque was a French post-impressionist painter born in Champigné sur Marne (Maine et Loire) in 1865 to parents of modest means. His father was a timber merchant who also ran a café in the village square. At the end of his adolescence, Lebasque began working in Angers as a house painter, then enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in the same city, which he left for Paris in 1884. He missed out on the scholarship that would have allowed him to enter the École des Beaux-Arts and stayed in the capital for only a year, his health forcing him to return to his hometown in 1885.
In 1886, he finally enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (after taking private lessons at the Académie Colarossi, a private school that provided him with a less expensive education when he arrived in Paris). At the Beaux-Arts, he was a student of Bonnat (official portraitist of the Third Republic), who described him as a very brilliant draftsman. During his early years in Paris, the painter divided his time between paid work and his personal training. He clearly explored various artistic avenues, but his spontaneous sympathy for the Nabis group and his encounters with Bonnard and Vuillard pushed him to become what he felt he was meant to be. The works produced from 1888 onwards show the influence of Impressionism, which brought him official recognition. He very quickly began exhibiting at Barc de Bouteville with Bonnard and Cottet, then at the Société des Artistes Français, and from 1893 at the Salon des Indépendants. At this time, he became friends with Luce and Signac. He was classified as one of the “Neo-Impressionists.”
In 1903, alongside Matisse, Lebasque participated in the founding of the Salon d'Automne. The artist, who was searching for his own path, eventually found it in the south of France, which Manguin introduced him to. In 1906, on Manguin's advice, Lebasque rented the Villa Demière in Saint Tropez. This was a year of real transition for the artist. His friendly relations with the Fauves, artistic confrontations at the Salons, and the radiant colors of the South of France clearly sparked a pictorial upheaval. From 1906 onwards, Lebasque's brushwork became freer, adopting vaporous pastel colors in harmony with a happy life, depicting selected moments set in peaceful villas, Arcadian gardens, riverbanks, and sunny beaches. The painter was particularly interested in femininity and childhood, using his wife Catherine, his two daughters Marthe and Hélène (Nono), and his son Pierre as models. It was at the Villa Demière that Catherine, his wife, offered her first nudes.
The omnipresence of his loved ones, in an atmosphere of serenity, transformed his paintings into an ode to the joy of living on the gentle Mediterranean coast. His new adopted home was now the Mediterranean coast, between Nice and Sanary. Saint-Tropez and Sainte-Maxime before he finally settled in Le Cannet in 1924, near Bonnard, while Matisse lived in Nice. Between his two friends, the Nabi and the Fauve, he developed a personal style full of freshness, whose sensitivity was the key to his success. Henri Lebasque died in Le Cannet on August 7, 1937. In 1952, the Galliera Museum dedicated a retrospective to him, as did the Ponchettes Museum in Nice in 1957. His studio was dispersed at Drouot in 1983.

Discover more works by this artist on the gallery's website: https://www.galeriepentcheff.fr/fr/peintre-henri-lebasque#Oeuvres