Lot 193: ARISTIDE MAILLOL

ARISTIDE MAILLOL 1861 - 1944 MÈRE ET ENFANT Signed with the artist's monogram (lower right) Oil on board 17 by 14 in. 43.2 by 35.5 cm Painted circa 1895.

Paris, Exposition portraits et figures de femmes, Ingres à Picasso, 1928, no. 105

Jos Hessel, Paris
Fairfax Hall (probably acquired from the above)
Private Collection (and sold: Christie's, London, June 22, 1993, lot 126)
Acquired at the above sale

Even though he is primarily known as a sculptor, Maillol painted throughout his life, and this aspect of his practice played a crucial role in his artistic evolution. The present work is a tender depiction of a mother breastfeeding. It is very similar to Maurice Denis's mother and child paintings of 1895, and indeed the ideas of the Nabis painters - founded by Denis and Sérusier - are crucial to our understanding of Maillol's paintings (see fig. 1). As Denis argued, "it must not be forgotten that a picture, before it is revealed as a battle-charger, a nude or some narrative or other, is fundamentally a flat surface covered with colour arranged in a certain order... the word décor has no pejorative meaning" (quoted in Waldemar George, Aristide Maillol, London, 1965, pp.75-76). The work is still and calm in its intimate domesticity, yet simultaneously dynamic in the lyricism of the winding forms of the fabric in the background, the mother's head and neck, as well as the flowers in the foreground. The painting's domestic setting, harmonic palette, as well its decorative forms make the work reminiscent of similar scenes by Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard.

In 1950, the poet Pierre Camo described the women Maillol depicted as "daughters of the earth," remarking upon "the line of a beautiful neck, the swelling breasts," and arguing that "no other artist since Renoir has loved and looked, caressed with his eyes, nor admired so voluptuously; nor has anyone but Maillol depicted the female form with such sensuous grace" (quoted in ibid., p.218).

Fig. 1 Maurice Denis, La Mère au corsage noir, 1895, oil on canvas, Galerie Hopkins-Custot, Paris