La Porte de la mer, Villefranche-sur-Mer

Literature

Historians have frequently described Le Sidaner’s work in terms of musicality and silence. Always in a ‘minor key,’ its subtle harmonies are seen to evoke a wistful mood that is intensified, as Paul Signac notes, by the absence of figures: “His oeuvre displays a taste for tender, soft and silent atmospheres. Gradually, he even went so far as to eliminate all human presence from his pictures, as if he feared that the slightest human form might disturb their muffled silence” (Y. Farinaux- Le Sidaner, op cit., p. 31).

After spending the first years of his life in the West Indies, Henri Le Sidaner returned to France with his family in 1872. He began art studies in 1877 with the history painter Alexandre Desmit in Dunkerque, and in 1882 entered Alexandre Cabanel’s atelier at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From 1882 to 1893, Le Sidaner often retreated to Etaples. The stern coastal landscape of the northern town appealed to the young artist, who suffered under the Ecole’s dictum of copying pictures in the Louvre. Le Sidaner explained that “Etaples–that is to say, Nature–revived me,” and that city provided many themes for his plein-air works.

Le Sidaner began exhibiting at the Salon in 1887. His naturalistic figural groups set in Etaples were well received and won him trips to Italy and Holland in 1891. Three years later, he exhibited Impressionist works influenced by Monet at the less conservative Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts. From around 1896 to the end of the century, Le Sidaner painted Symbolist themes in which pensive, virginal women dressed in white inhabit dimly lit gardens. In these paintings, which recall the early canvases of his friend Henri Martin, Le Sidaner initiated the aura of mystery and the Divisionist technique characteristic of his late work.

After the turn of the century, Le Sidaner rarely portrayed the human figure. Instead, he depicted provincial setting in Bruges, Beauvais, and Chartres, and urban areas such as London and Venice. Images of the gardens and interior of his home in Gerberoy, where he resided from 1901 or 1902, also are prevalent in later works. He did, however, often imply human presence in a set table or an open book, adding to the intimate yet mysterious quality of his painting.

Like his close friends Henri Martin and Ernest Laurent, Le Sidaner was only tenuously associated with Neo-Impressionism and tempered its techniques with an otherwise traditional approach. He enjoyed continued favor, and from 1897 was regularly honored with solo shows not only in Paris, but also in London, Brussels, and the United States. In 1930 he was made a professor at the Academie des Beaux-Arts, replacing Ernest Laurent, and was named its president in 1937.
Throughout the 1920s, Le Sidaner depicted the poetic suggestions of the most varied corners of France, from his own garden in Gerberoy to the park in Versailles and from the scenery of Brittany to that of the South of France. He gradually moved away from the hazy and diffused glow which characterised much of his work to a brighter range of color. The same year as our painting was made a different version from the same vantage point but different time of day is depiceted in a work kept at the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Madrid.

Charming towns, cities and churches are typical motifs in Le Sidanaer’s work. Villefranche-sur-Mer is situated between Nice and Monaco and Le Sidaner often painted charming and picturesque scenes from around the area. The image represents a metaphor of Le Sidaner’s feelings of endearment toward this idyllic place. The artist first visited Villefrance-sur-Mer in 1910 but it was not until the following decade that he stayed at the Hotel Welcome, in the heart of the old harbor to recreate the magic of the City. Our setting exudes peacefullness and calm. The scene is bathed in a warm atmospheric light of the setting sun.