Aristide Delannoy 1874-1911

“Delannoy was not merely a member of the Indépendants; in both his art and his life, he was the Independent - fighting, without concern for gain or ambition, for what he believed to be right, shaping what he believed to be beautiful. As worthy a man as he was an artist, he demonstrated in every act, in every work, a steadfast and uncompromising freedom.”

It is in these laudatory terms that Paul Signac, writing in Hommes du jour, paid a vibrant tribute to the painter Aristide Delannoy, who had just died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-seven. Born in Béthune into a modest family of small watchmakers, the young man (affected by deafness) developed very early a true vocation for painting. After studying drawing and painting with Pharaon de Winter at the École des beaux-arts de Lille, he joined Léon Bonnat’s atelier at the École des beaux-arts de Paris in 1897.

The following year, he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Artistes Français, but obliged to support himself, he turned to poster design for Parisian cafés, before applying his talent to humorous and satirical press. His first drawings appeared from 1900 in publications such as Gil Blas Illustré, Le Pêle-Mêle, Le Frou-Frou, Le Petit Illustré amusant, and Le Sourire.

Of anarchist sensibility, he also published caricatures in more politically engaged journals like L’Assiette au beurre from 1901, and collaborated with numerous libertarian and anti-militarist periodicals, including Les Temps nouveaux and La Guerre sociale. During this period, he became friends with Charles Angrand and Maximilien Luce. Likely introduced by Luce to Jean Grave’s circle, he became the staff illustrator for Hommes du jour, producing nearly one hundred and fifty covers, each a vitriolic satire of the leading figures of his time (fig. 1).

Several times scrutinized by the authorities, Delannoy was registered and listed in the “Carnet B” by the Paris police prefecture in 1903 as a “revolutionary socialist and antimilitarist.” This did not prevent him from exhibiting at the Indépendants from 1902 to 1906, as well as at the Salon d’Automne and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1904. Originally from the north of France, he studied on-site the harsh daily lives of the “gueules noires” (coal miners), both for his paintings and for L’Assiette au beurre, even covering the Courrières mining disaster of 1906 alongside the painters Jules Grandjouan and Ricardo Florès.

Dated 1902, our striking portrait of a bearded man in profile, wearing his artist’s cap in the style of a condottiere, is a perfect example of the technical mastery acquired by Aristide Delannoy at the beginning of the twentieth century. The use of vivid colors, broad, swiftly brushed strokes, combined with deliberate pointillism, explains why avant-garde critics often associated him with Signac, Luce, Angrand, or Henri-Edmond Cross, “the true Independents, those who never consented to submit their works to the judgment of any jury.”