Provenance:
Sotheby's London; 22 June 1938, Lot 128
Galerie Buhler, Munich
Exhibited:
Salon d'Automne, Grand Palais des Champs Elysees, Paris, 6
Oct - 15 Nov 1906, no. 788
One hundred fifteenth exhibition: Pictures by Henri Harpignies, French Gallery, London, 1923, no. 24
A great admirer of Corot, Harpignies favored carefully chosen viewpoints and a skillful balance between precise detail and clever simplification to give his views of the French countryside a timeless monumentality. He offset the conservative character of his compositions with bold colors and a breadth of paint handling that were demonstrably modern. In the triumphant advance of landscape painting during the second half of the nineteenth-century, Harpignies was a particularly influential master.
Harpignies was born July 24, 1819 in Valenciennes where his family owned a sugar-beet factory. He received only modest drawing lessons before entering the world of commerce and not until he was 27 did he begin studying landscape painting seriously in the Paris studio of J.-A. Achard. On Achard's advice, he traveled in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, studying and painting as he went. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1853. In 1854 he worked at Marly near the Forest of Fontainebleau and he returned to the Forest often in subsequent years. He studied the works of the major Barbizon masters who were then just coming into wide acceptance and although he was never a pupil of Corot, he was deeply influenced by Corot's compositional skills and coloring. He continued to travel widely in the manner of the first generation of French realist landscape painters, thirty years earlier, ranging from Nevers in the northeast through the Allier region in central France to the Pyrenees.
In 1862 the Gazette des Beaux-Arts noted that successes were rapidly accumulating for Harpignies, but the following year three of his four paintings were refused by an unusually draconian Salon Jury. Offended, he spent the next two years in Italy. He was vindicated in 1865 when the Emperor purchased one of his Salon paintings. In 1866 the State acquired two pictures and he was awarded a gold medal. Over the next fifty years, he participated in virtually every Salon, often sending watercolors as well as oil paintings; and he exhibited widely outside Paris as well. During the 1870s, he favored Hérisson in the Allier area of the Auvergne; then in 1879 he purchased property in St.-Privé in Burgundy and spent most summers painting there. In the 1880s, he spent winters painting at Nice, Antibes, and elsewhere along the Riviera. In addition to his gold medal in 1866, Harpignies received numerous further prizes including the grand prix award at the Exposition Universelle in 1900.
He submitted to the Salon until 1913 when he exhibited Vallée de Castellar; environs de Menton (Castellar Valley; environs of Menton) and Oliviers à Menton (Olive Trees at Menton). He continued to paint until his death on August 28, 1916, despite being almost blind. He died in Saint-Privé, Yonne at ninety-seven. In a eulogy, the popular critic Anatole France saluted Harpignies as "the Michelangelo of trees."
Paintings by Henri-Joseph Harpignies are in museums worldwide, including:
Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, CA
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Gallery, London
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA
