Lot 420: Henri Delavallée (1862-1943)

Henri Delavallée (1862-1943)
Le groom
signed and dated 'H.Delavallée 1890' (lower left)
oil on canvas
62 5/8 x 31 7/8 in. (159 x 81 cm.)
Painted in 1890

Quimper, Musée des Beaux-Arts, L'Ecole de Pont-Aven dans les collections publiques et privés de Bretagne, July 1978 - March 1979, no. 24 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Rennes and Nantes.

J. Sutter, Les Néo-Impressionnistes, 1970, p. 200 (illustrated; incorrectly dated 1888).
C.G. Le Paul, L'Impressionnisme dans l'Ecole de Pont-Aven, Lausanne/Paris, 1983, p. 238 (titled 'Le Cireur de bottes).
Exhib. cat., A. Cariou, Impressionnistes et néo-impressionnistes en Bretagne, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper, 1999, p. 67, footnote 129 (titled 'Le Cireur de bottes').

Marie Rouat, Riec-sur-Bellon.

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A brilliant high school student in his birthplace of Rheims, Henri Delavallée later studied simultaneously at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and at the Sorbonne-Lettres where he quickly distinguished himself. Pursuing the artistic side of his training, Delavallée was inspired above all by Millet, Corot and Courbet and soon began to paint en plein-air. It was while in Pont-Aven in the early 1880s that the artist first met Gauguin and Sérusier and became one of the first devotees of the Ecole de Pont-Aven. Around 1887 Delavallée met Seurat and it was between then and the end of the decade that the artist, then in his mid-twenties, produced a series of canvases that demonstrate his remarkable grasp of pointillisme.

Delavallée has here depicted an entirely new métier, created in response to the demand for jobs caused by the gradual industrialisation of France and the subsequent influx of people into the cities. Le groom represents the Parisian artists's new found fascination with these lower social classes and the predilection, in depicting them, to raise the ordinary to the level of the heroic. Le groom is a testament to the upheaval of the social order in Paris at the end of the 19th century.