Jacques Martin (villeurbanne 1844 - Lyon 1919) - Woman In Blue With A Mandolin, Circa 1915

Jacques MARTIN (Villeurbanne 1844 - Lyon 1919)
Woman in Blue with Mandolin, circa 1915
Oil on canvas
73 × 59 cm
Workshop sale stamp on the reverse.

Provenance
• Workshop sale, Me Bussillet, April 20, 2020, lot 161
• Private collection, France

This work depicts a young woman dressed in a blue gown, seated in an intimate interior, holding a mandolin. The figure, deliberately sketched in the facial features, stands out against a dark and vibrant background built up with layered, broad, and colorful brushstrokes. Here, the artist favors pictorial sensation over description, allowing texture and color to structure the space.

The palette, dominated by deep blues enlivened with bright whites, ochres, and warm touches, reveals a particularly refined chromatic exploration. The thick, expressive paint application, characteristic of Jacques Martin’s late style, gives the work a strong presence and a sensitive modernity, close to the Post-Impressionist aesthetic typical of Lyon painting at the turn of the century. The subject of the musician, inherited from the tradition of genre painting, is treated here with restraint and poetry, in a silent and meditative atmosphere.

A self-taught painter initially trained as an engineer at the École Centrale de Lyon, Jacques Martin developed from the 1880s onwards a free and deeply personal body of work, based on color, light, and texture. Encouraged by François Vernay and influenced by Renoir, he held a unique position in Lyon’s artistic life, which he helped to renew by co-founding the Salon d’Automne in Lyon in 1904.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, one of his earliest admirers, wrote about him:
“Mr. Jacques Martin is the pride of contemporary Lyon painting. This, which no one doubts today, was long considered a paradox. (…)”

Upon his death in 1919, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon held a retrospective in his honor, and the Musée du Luxembourg acquired one of his canvases. Today, his works are held notably in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the Musée Paul-Dini in Villefranche-sur-Saône, the Picasso Museum in Antibes, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chambéry.

The work is listed in the Catalogue of the Workshop of the Painter Jacques Martin, published on the occasion of the posthumous sale of his studio held in Lyon on April 20 and 21, 1920, under number 161, titled Woman in Blue with Mandolin.