ACHILLE EMILE OTHON FRIESZ (French, 1879-1949). La Rance, 1936. Oil on canvas. 21 x 25-1/2 inches (53.3 x 64.8 cm). Sign...

Description

ACHILLE EMILE OTHON FRIESZ (French, 1879-1949)
La Rance, 1936
Oil on canvas
21 x 25-1/2 inches (53.3 x 64.8 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: E. Othon Friesz / 1936

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE TEXAS COLLECTION

PROVENANCE:
Gift from the artist to his daugher upon the birth of her son Phillip;
Galerie Charpentier, Paris (label verso);
Wally Findlay Galleries, New York;
Private collection, Washington, D.C., purchased from the above, 1967;
By descent to the present owner.

LITERATURE:
M. Gauthier, Othon Friesz, Geneva, 1957, No. 112, illus.

Othon Friesz's lush and verdant La Rance is a love song to the countryside of Normandy and Brittany, which inspired some of his best works from his late period. Early in his career, around 1905, Friesz had defined himself as a Fauve painter, together with such colleagues as Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, and André Derain, whose compositions with bold, primary colors and flattened forms influenced successive generations of modernist artists. After World War I, however, Friesz yearned for a return to the traditional painting tenets that he had learned in art school in Le Havre: solid volumes, spatial separation of planes, and more subdued color.

It was while vacationing in Dinan and Saint-Malo in Brittany in 1935-36, that Friesz hiked along the Rance, a local river, and encountered an ideal setting for his naturalistic landscapes:

He discovers, on the Rance, a landscape of trees and water which enchants him because it responds to his ideal of classicism and nature and which he made the background of several compositions where the female nude harmonizes with the rhythms and colors of the sky and the earth [translated].1

The resulting "La Rance" paintings - the present lot, as well as others like Paysage sur la Rance, La Rance à Dinan, and Baigneuses sur La Rance - share key features, notably a palette of earth-tone greens and tans, energized brushwork, and a balanced composition where a dense screen of trees weights bands of water and sky. Compared to others in the series, La Rance includes an interesting architectural feature - the Roman aqueduct passing over a section of the river - and especially lively lines and patterning.

1M. Gauthier, Othon Friesz, Geneva, 1957, p. 128.




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