Auction Name: 2025 November 18 Fine European Art Signature® Auction

Lot Number: 69016

Shortcut to Lot: HA.com/8223*69016

Tobeen (Félix Bonnet) (French, 1880-1938)
Paysage de Ciboure avec le chemin du vieux cimetière et le clocher, circa 1916-1920
Oil on canvas
25-3/4 x 18-1/4 inches (65.4 x 46.4 cm)
Signed lower right: Tobeen

PROVENANCE:
Florence Flast (1921-1992), New York, acquired 1970s;
Barry (1950-2013) and Mary Flast, New York, inherited from the above;
Private collection, Eugene, Oregon, gift from the above.

This painting is listed in the Catalogue Raisonné Jean Richard/Goikoetxea (CR JRG) under no. 382.

Painted circa 1916-1920, the years surrounding the First World War, Paysage de Ciboure avec le chemin du vieux cimetière et le clocher marks a moment of transition and renewal in Tobeen's art (born Félix Bonnet, his "artistic" first name is an anagram of his given surname). The familiar forms of the French Basque Country-its winding roads, clustered hills, and terraced greenery-are here synthesized into geometric discipline and natural rhythm, creating a deeply personal vision of a region that inspired the artist. Rising at the edge of the composition, the dark octagonal tower is that of the Église Saint-Vincent de Ciboure, the sixteenth-century parish church, its distinctive octagonal tower dominating the old town and overlooking a forecourt once paved with tombstones. Tobeen spent his childhood summers in Ciboure (Ziburu in the Basque language, "the end of the bridge" connecting the town with Saint-Jean-de-Luz across the river Nivelle) and returned to the southwestern region throughout his life. This tower was both a geographic landmark and, here, a pictorial anchor in a rigorously constructed composition revealing the artist's unique synthesis of the period's prevailing art movements: Post-Impressionism and Cubism. Further, suffering from the trauma of the war, Tobeen found refuge in the Basque country; painting it was a meditation and expression of the divine order of nature (while his Catholicism informed his art, Tobeen had a broader spiritualism). As the critic Théodore Duret observed in 1913, of Tobeen's works: "One feels... a strong flavor of the soil - that is what gives them life. The simplified, almost archaic forms that at first might appear purely conventional, forbidding emotion, instead permit the rendering of life and feeling, because the artist has remained attached to his land and has drawn substance from it" (as translated from the French and quoted in J. P. Goikoetxea, Tobeen: un modern chez le Basque, Urrugne, 2012, p. 50).

In the present work, the Basque landscape unfolds through a series of faceted planes and overlapping diagonals. Trees, hills, and fields are simplified into interlocking volumes, their rhythmic balance recalling Paul Cézanne's structural approach to nature. Tobeen's geometry, while indebted to Cubism (he was part of the movement's landmark Section d'Or exhibition of 1912), remains atmospheric. His use of softened contours and modulated color distinguishes him from the Cubists of Paris (R. Huber, Tobeen: un poète du cubisme, Haarlem, 2012, p. 104). The ochres and greens-tempered by grey shadows and pale sky-create the sensation of place even as the composition tends toward abstraction. Indeed, color remains central to Tobeen's method. Unlike many of his Cubist contemporaries, Tobeen embraced color and light which, in the present work, create a tonal rhythm, moving the viewer's eye through the composition as if traveling the rolling Basque hills themselves.

Tobeen's treatment of space in Paysage de Ciboure avec le chemin du vieux cimetière et le clocher reflects his interest in the equilibrium between depth and surface. The sinuous path that cuts diagonally across the canvas establishes perspective but is countered by the frontal alignment of the church tower, flattening the spatial field. This oscillation between recession and planarity-a key preoccupation of post-Cézannian painters-demonstrates Tobeen's understanding of how to build compositional coherence without reliance on traditional perspective.

Paysage de Ciboure avec le chemin du vieux cimetière et le clocher belongs to Tobeen's mature, contemplative phase, when his Cubist discipline, influenced by artists like André Lhote and Jean Metzinger, softened into more reflective works depicting nature. Ultimately, for Tobeen, the geometry and rhythm of Cubism were tools to more deeply explore the world around him. Tobeen "has made of the landscape a mirror of the order of the universe," explained Gabriel Frizeau, an important collector of the artist's work along with those by Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon (as translated from the French and quoted in Goikoetxea, p. 16). The quiet order of the present work anticipates the artist's later paintings of the 1920s, in which landscape becomes a vehicle for formal balance and visual harmony. Paysage de Ciboure avec le chemin du vieux cimetière et le clocher stands at a significant point in Tobeen's career-an affirmation of the artist's place within the broader evolution of modern French painting.


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