HIPPOLYTE PETITJEAN French, 1854-1929 . Sous-Bois, 1890-1894
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HIPPOLYTE PETITJEAN French, 1854-1929 . Sous-bois, 1890-1894 Oil on board, laid on panel 11 5/8 x 15 5/8 in. (29.6 x 40 cm) Provenance: Galerie Zack, Paris Private collection, acquired from above in 1966 Samuel Josefowitz, Lausanne Sale Sothebys New York, May 4, 2011 (lot 258) for $ 22,500; With Stephen Ongpin Fine Art; Private Collection. Literature: John Sillevis, Hans Verbeek and Hans Kraan, A Feast of Colour: Post-Impressionists from private collections, excat, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1990, pp. 160-161, no 58; Rainer Budde, ed., Pointillismus: Auf den Spuren von Georges Seurat, excat, Munich, 1997, p. 253, no 101 Exhibition: ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Noordbrabants Museum, A Feast of Colour Post-Impressionists from private collections, excat, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1990, no 58; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage, Pointillisme: Sur les traces de Seurat, 1997, no 101. Accompanied by a photo-certificate from Stéphane Kempa and to be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné. Although he lived until the age of seventy-five, Petitjean was never very prolific as a painter, producing only about 350 paintings. His subject matter was diverse and included landscapes, urban scenes, mythological subjects and, occasionally, portraits. Petitjean had come to Paris in 1872, studying first with the academic master Alexandre Cabanel, before joining the Neo-Impressionists artists in 1886. The term ‘Neo-Impressionism was coined by the art critic Félix Fénéon in a review of the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, where divisionist paintings by Seurat, Signac and Camille Pissarro were hung together in one room. Petitjean stayed faithful to the pointillist technique throughout his career, exhibiting in Paris and in Brussels, in spite of struggling financially and earning most of his income as a teacher. Only at a small group show in 1899 at Galerie Durand-Ruel did he sell enough paintings to finally achieve some financial stability. In a notebook in which the artist carefully recorded his output after 1886 a, numerous paintings, drawings and watercolors are listed as having been being gifted or sold to creditors in exchange for services, or to pay bills, while in several years no sales are recorded at all. This was complicated by the decline of the appeal of the movement in general, even for artists Pissarro and Signac, after the death of Seurat in 1891. Petitjean, however, never abandoned pointillism as a method of artistic expression, and continued to exhibit his work regularly at the Salon des Indépendants until the very end of his career. In May 1929, shortly before his death, an exhibition of twenty- eight of his works was mounted in a Parisian gallery, from which one painting was purchased by the State for the Musée du Luxembourg. In 2015-2016 a major Petitjean retrospective was mounted at the Musées des Mâcon, which today holds a substantial collection of the artist’s work, amounting to some 117 paintings and drawings. Executed within a few years of Georges Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, this oil dates to 1890-94, the years when Petitjean’s work was closest to Seurat’s. In both works, the border of the painting is decorated by a painted frame of dots of contrasting colors, setting off the pointillist depiction of the main scene. .