Louis Marie de Schryver (French, 1862-1942). Le marché aux fleurs de la Madeleine, 1891. Oil on canvas. 21-1/2 x 25-3/4 ...

Description

Louis Marie de Schryver (French, 1862-1942)
Le marché aux fleurs de la Madeleine, 1891
Oil on canvas
21-1/2 x 25-3/4 inches (54.6 x 65.4 cm)
Signed and dated lower left: De Schryver / .1891.

Property from the Merryl Israel Aron Family Trust

PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Michigan;
Christie's, New York, October 16, 1991, lot 7A;
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

The present work highlights Louis Marie de Schryver's continued expression of his passion for florals. In Le marché aux fleurs de la Madeleine, they take center stage, resplendently colorful and bursting with life.

Replete with eye-catching passages rendered in brisk, confident strokes, and the artist's characteristic presentation of both the leisure and working classes on the streets of Paris, the composition draws together several typical details that we expect to see in De Schryver's work.

The young woman tending the stall stoops to pack a vibrant pink azalea plant into its paper wrapper, the swan-like shape of which lends a sense of elegance to her labor. The artist's particular affinity for the flower sellers of Paris is evident in their dignified appearance and the rather tender application of the paint immortalizing them. In the distance, we catch a glimpse of a fashionably dressed society lady strolling around the market with her black standard poodle, perhaps the same pair who we see in De Schryver's Flower Seller, Rainy Day of 1888, which was sold in these rooms in December 2023.

The men of De Schryver's Paris tend to absorb considerably less attention, yet the gentleman patron of the flower stall manages to be remarkably compelling. Standing quietly at the far right, holding his cane and quite seriously considering his own gloves, the man acts as a pillar, just edging into the picture plane. We see just enough of his face to know that he is handsome, that he is somehow familiar. The radical crop of the figure is a tantalizing suggestion that the new medium of photography, with its abrupt truncation and daring angles, may have been a source of compositional inspiration for the artist. Interestingly, on the occasion of the 1991 sale of this work at Christie's, the artist's daughter, Elisabeth Hert-de Schryver, confirmed that we do know him in fact, or rather, her father did. This seemingly random gentleman was not just another wanderer of the bustling Parisian boulevards, but a friend of De Schryver's. Outside of his regular employment as a notary public in Paris, he frequently posed for the painter.

De Schryver was known to go out into the city to sketch and paint en plein air, and this information adds another delightful layer to his process. It hints that the spontaneity for which he was so well known was also occasionally not entirely natural. Perhaps periodically De Schryver's work was helped along by the conveniently timely arrival of a handsome, impeccably dressed gentleman to the spot where the artist sat working.


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