Maximilien Luce
(French, 1858-1941)

"Le Jeune Jardinier de Gentilly"

oil on canvas
signed lower left. Framed.
16-1/4" x 13"

Provenance: Lombrail sale, Enghien-les-Bains, France, June 21, 1989, lot 74; Ader, Paris, France, November 22, 1989, lot 62; Eric Pillon Encheres, Calais, France, March 4, 1990, lot 58; Claude Augettes, Paris, France, March 31, 2006, lot 184; Tajan, Paris, July 28, 2009, lot 1; Private collection, Belle Alliance Plantation, Lafourche Bayou, Louisiana.

Literature: Illustrated: Bouin-Luce, Jean and Denise Bazetoux. Maximilien Luce: Catalogue Raisonne de l'Oeuvre Peint, Paris, 1986, vol. III, no. 18, p. 58.

Notes: Born into a family of modest means to a railway clerk and a mother whose family was from the peasantry, Luce always had a deep predilection for the working class. After serving in the military for four years, Luce began his artistic career as an engraver, before turning to painting full time in 1883, when employment opportunities for engravers became scarce, due to advancements in printmaking. nfluenced by the Impressionists that advocated plein air studies, Luce took multiple day trips to the outskirts of Paris - painting the changing effects of sunlight on the fields, gardens and laborers through the juxtaposition of colors quickly applied in wet overlapping impastos through rapid short brushstrokes. A fine example of this is the "Le Jeune Jardinier" offered here, which closely resembles two other gardener depictions painted ca. 1880-1881 in Lagny-sur-Marne and Bois-Le-Roi (Fontainebleau) - the latter of which sold as lot 2890 on November 6, 2014 at Christie's, New York for $60,000. In all three works, Luce elucidates the depth of the shaded foliage through layered tertiary blue and green hues offset by warm grays, blacks and browns created through the mixture of complementary colors.

In 1887 Luce was introduced to the Neo-Impressionist group by fellow artist Camille Pissarro, and quickly adopted the Divisionist technique of color application in separate patches or dots, believing it achieved unprecedented luminosity in paintings. By the early 1900s, Luce blended the dots, reverting back to a more tempered Impressionist style that he maintained in various facets throughout his life. Few artists at the turn of the century were as versatile in their range of subjects as Luce. He painted the coast of St. Tropez, day laborers (gardeners and washwomen) at Gentilly, and later at his home as an old man in Rollebois with the same passion and sensitivity that he did the factory and mine workers at the height of his Divisionist period. Luce simultaneously celebrated working class toil and conscription and recoiled from the brutish conditions and physique it engendered. War War I, the "Great War to End all Wars", was not, as Luce knew from experience, the glorified expedition war propaganda promoted it to be. As a staunch anti-militarist, he created a series of paintings that depicted the true stasis of war - waiting to be mobilized, waiting to go to battle, waiting to die, even wounded veterans awaiting transport from the epicenters of transits - the Paris train stations. In the preceding lot, the soldiers, engrossed in the solitude of their thoughts, are a still-life transfixed around the remnants of a shared meal on the station steps. This painting, along with 49 other paintings from Luce's World War I soldier series, was likely part of his exposition "Les Gares de Paris pendant la guerre (The Train Stations of Paris During the War)" exhibited at Berheim Jeune et Cie. gallery from October 23-November 11,1916. In Emile Verhaeren's preface to the catalogue for Luce's 1909 exhibition at Bernheim Jeune et Cie., Emile Verhaeren captured the virtuoso of Luce's oeuvre: "In this way you show us not only with the finery of your colors and lines fragments of the world that beauty appears to banish from its domain, but you also prove a talent as powerful , strong and fierce as you."

References: Bertrand Tillier, "Du souvenir de la Commune de Paris a l' Experience de la Grande Guerre: Luce et la Peinture d' Histoire", Maximilien Luce Neo-Impressionniste. Giverny: Ed. Marina Ferretti Bocquillon. Giverny: Musee des Impressionnismes, 2010. pp. 27-28; Verhaeren, Emile. Exposition Luce chez MM. Bernheim Jeune et Cie. Paris: Moderne Imprimerie, 1909.