Henri Gervex 1852-1929

A pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and the Orientalist Eugène Fromentin, Henri Gervex achieved early recognition at the age of twenty-two during his second participation in the Salon in 1874. His painting Satyre jouant avec une bacchante (Satyr Playing with a Bacchante) earned him a second-class medal and was acquired by the French State for the Musée du Luxembourg. He subsequently alternated mythological subjects in the pure academic tradition with portraits and genre scenes. Increasingly sharing the modern concerns of the early Impressionists (particularly their taste for contemporary subjects and a lighter palette), Gervex formed close friendships with Degas, Manet, and Renoir in the cafés of the Nouvelle Athènes district. Following the rejection of Rolla for indecency at the Salon of 1878, his success took on a whiff of scandal, and the painter multiplied intimate scenes highlighting seductive nudes rendered with an almost photographic realism.

Lively and witty, and moving in the circles of Rodin, Helleu, Blanche, and Guy de Maupassant, Gervex enjoyed a brilliant career marked by honours, distinctions, and official commissions in France and abroad. A member of the jury for the Expositions Universelles of 1889 and 1900, he was made Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1911 (having previously been named Chevalier in 1882 and Officer in 1889) and was elected to the Institut de France in 1913. He also contributed to the decoration of several major public buildings, including the Paris Hôtel de Ville, the Opéra-Comique, the buffet of the Gare de Lyon, the Sorbonne, and the town hall of the 19th arrondissement.

The present large pastel on paper highlights the technical mastery Henri Gervex also achieved in drawing. Like Degas, he made pastel one of his preferred mediums. Alongside his participation in the Salons, he exhibited almost continuously between 1885 and 1928 at the Galerie Georges Petit with the Société des pastellistes français, of which he became president in 1913. Here, Gervex captures the pearly nude of a young woman with red hair gathered into a chignon, standing with her back to the viewer, her profile elusive, turned toward her psyche - an imposing mirror of dark wood adorned with gleaming bronze ornaments set in the background.

As was his custom, the artist pays particular attention to the play of light on flesh, seemingly enveloping his model in a light haze that harmonises her delicate, milky complexion with the tones of the white, crumpled dress casually draped over the chair to the left. Imbued with deep sensuality, this pastel bears witness to Gervex’s poetic and refined sensibility. Whether through his role as the acknowledged lover of the notorious demi-mondaine Valtesse de La Bigne, who inspired the heroine of the novel, or through his close ties with Émile Zola, the artist was partly involved in the genesis of Nana. After the successive scandals provoked by Manet’s painting in 1877 and Zola’s novel published in 1879, Gervex persistently returned to the Naturalist theme of the courtesan surprised at her toilette. By infusing these scenes with a delicate intimacy that combines compositional rigour with great freedom of execution, he succeeded in bridging the world of the most official painting with the modernity of the Impressionist movement.