Maurice Denis, Bucolique d’Automne or L’Heureux Verger Pouldu, 1906 Oil on canvas, 32.3 x 46.1 in. (82 x 117 cm.) New York Private Collection Provenance Sold to Baron Bodenheim, 1906-08; Collection Bernheim, 1908-15; Collection Edwards, 1915—; Brooklyn Museum, 1927—; Collection Riesenbach; Collection Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 1960.

Exhibitions Salon de la Nationale, Paris, no. 383, 1906. Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris no. 30, 1910. Zurich, no. 93, 1913. Budapest, no. 78, 1913 Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1916. Collection Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Dayton, no. 94, 1960.

Maurice Denis (1870-1943) was an important, though beguiling, figure in European Post-Impressionism. Along with Paul Serusier, Eduoard Vuillard, and Paul Bonnard, Denis was a founding member of Les Nabis, a group of influential French artists who laid the groundwork for Cubism, Fauvism, and Abstractionism in the decades to come.

Bucolique d’Automne or L’Heureaux Verger Pouldu (Fig. 1) is a large oil painting depicting two female figures, along with four small children, in varying states of undress, lazing in a fruit tree orchard in Autumn. This type of idealized depiction of women in gardens, often picking or eating fruit, was common among French artists in the 19th century. They can be viewed as echoes of a longstanding fascination among European artists and poets with depictions of pastoral idyll. Friedrich Schiller describes this fascination thusly:

… this kind of pleasure in regard to nature is not aesthetical, but rather moral; for it is produced by means of an idea, not immediately through contemplation; also, it by no means depends upon the beauty of forms. What would even a plain flower, a spring, a mossy stone, the chirping of birds, the buzzing of bees, etc., have in itself so charming for us? What could give it any claim upon our love? It is not these objects, it is an idea represented through them, which we love in them. We love in them the quietly working life, the calm effects from out itself, existence under its own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with itself.

They are what we were; they are what we ought to become once more. We were nature as they, and our culture should lead us back to nature, upon the path of reason and freedom. They are therefore at the same time a representation of our lost childhood, which remains eternally most dear to us; hence they fill us with a certain melancholy. At the same time, they are representations of our highest perfection in the ideal, hence, they transpose us into a sublime emotion.1

1 Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom, trans. William F. Wertz, vol. 1 (New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985). Nature as a symbol of a “pure” morality, or even of faith—one that has been lost and must be found–is an idea that would have complemented both Denis’ devout Catholicism as well as his deeply spiritual, almost mystical, approach to his art.

This painting was executed in 1906 (Fig. 2), well after Denis’s 1898 trip to Rome—a trip that would signal the beginning of a gradual drift from the radically simplified, two-dimensional color planes that one sees in the work of the Post-Impressionist Nabis–towards the clean lines and allegorical themes of a new classical revivalist aesthetic that would define Denis’ work for the rest of his life.

Research: M.S.

Fig. 1

Maurice Denis, Bucolique d’Automne or L’Heureux Verger Pouldu Oil on canvas, 1906 32.3 x 46.1 in. (82 x 117 cm.) New York Private Collection Fig. 2

Bucolique d’Automne, detail of signature Catalogue Raisonné certificate for Bucolique d'Automne

PROVENANCE: EXHIBITIONS:

Sold to Baron Bodenhausen, 1906-08; Salon de la Nationale, Paris, no. 383, 1906. Gallerie Collection Bernheim, 1908-15; Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, no. 30, 1910. Zurich, no.93, 1913. Collection Edwards, 1915—; Budapest, no. 78, 1913. Brooklyn Museum, 1927—; Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1916. Collection Reisenbach; Collection Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Dayton no. 94, 1960. Collection Walter P. Chrysler, 1960.