Lot 99: Simon Harmon Vedder (American, 1866-1937) Young Breton girl in profile

Simon Harmon Vedder (American, 1866-1937)
Young Breton girl in profile
signed, inscribed, dedicated and dated 'To Mrs Whitman./-SIMON HARMON VEDDER-/ETAPLES. 1890.' (lower left)
oil on panel
46.2 x 31.5cm (18 3/16 x 12 3/8in).

Footnotes

• Provenance
  Anon. sale, Mes Bernard Jozon, Yves Rabourdin, Olivier Choppin de Janvry, Paris, 18 April 1984.
  Private collection, UK (acquired at the above sale).
  
  Simon Harmon Vedder's charming profile portrait of a peasant child fits comfortably the work of British and American expatriate art students who formed a colony at Étaples in the Pas-de-Calais in the late 1880s. Most of these young artists followed the tenets of the modern rural Naturalism practiced by Bastien-Lepage, Léon Lhermitte and Dagnan-Bouveret. By the time of Vedder's arrival in 1890, Max Bohm, Gaines Ruger Donoho, Walter Gay, Birge Harrison, Elizabeth Nourse and Eugene Vail had all spent time in the village or were currently still in residence.υ1 They had been joined in 1887 by British artists such as Philip Wilson Steer, and, later in that year, by George Clausen and his brother-in-law, Alfred Webster, who were visiting the newly arrived Irish Impressionist, Frank O'Meara.
  
  Born in Montgomery County, New York, Vedder studied at the Metropolitan Art Museum schools in New York before registering at the atelier Julian in Paris under Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury in the autumn of 1887. He was also for a time, a student under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux Arts. During these years he met and married Eva Roos who was also a student in Paris, and by the early nineties the couple had settled in London and were developing reputations as illustrators. Both also exhibited at the Royal Academy and Vedder was among those selected for the American Section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.υ2
  
  Among his American confrères in 1890 Vedder would have found peasant profiles painted by Vail, Nourse and others. These inevitably accentuated the stoicism of the Étaples fisher folk. In Vedder's ingenue however, this is translated into tenderness. Yet where others might lapse into sentimentality, the young American approaches his infant sitter with all documentary instincts of a reporter. The identity of the picture's recipient, 'Mrs Whitman', remains obscure, although this could possibly be Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman (1842–1904) - American stained glass artist, painter and book cover designer. In 1877, she made the first of two trips to France to study with Thomas Couture at Villiers-le-Bel and may have come across Vedder in her travels. There can be no doubt however, that the gift of Young Breton girl in profile brought innocent delight.
  
  υ1 See Jean-Claude Lesage, Peintres Americains en Pas-de-Calais, La Colonie d'Étaples, AMME Éditions, Abbeville, 2007, p. 214.
  υ2 Diane P Fisher Ed., Paris 1900, The American School at the Universal Exhibition, Rutgers University Press, 2000, p. 204. Vedder's portrait of the sculptor, William Goscombe John (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff) suggests that he was widely known in British artistic circles at the time.