Emile Auguste Wéry 1868-1935

The son of a Reims engraver and chaser, the painter Émile Wéry moved to Paris at a young age, where he successively studied under Léon Bonnat, Jules Lefebvre, and François Flameng at the Académie Julian. It was at this renowned school that he befriended Henri Matisse, who occupied a studio adjacent to his on Boulevard Montparnasse. During a trip to Brittany they took with Augustin Hanicotte in the spring of 1896, Matisse noted Wéry’s adoption of certain Impressionist principles, particularly a bright and clear color palette: “At that time, I only had bistre and earth tones on my palette, while Wéry had an Impressionist palette.”

Exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1889, the young artist met with some success, receiving third and second-class medals in 1897 and 1898, and then a silver medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, before being named a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1906. His atmospheric landscapes and Breton subjects were quickly sought after by notable collectors, such as Count Edward Aleksander Raczyński and Henry Vasnier. Around 1910, he settled in Provence, first near Renoir and his house at Les Collettes, and later, toward the end of the war, at Les Hauts-de-Cagnes, in an old mill he named “La Maison Rouge,” which he decorated with frescoes in the dining room.

Dated 1889, the painting we present belongs to the rare corpus of Émile Wéry’s early works. Still quite distant from Impressionism, it reflects, both in subject and technique, the painter’s initial interest in the synthesis of the Nabis. The affectionate dedication to “my friend Émile Bernard,” presumably met at the Académie Julian, indicates a real closeness to the avant-garde group exhibiting their works that same year at the Café Volpini, as part of the Exposition Universelle. Here, Wéry introduces us to the intimate world of a small bedroom, where a young woman sleeps, stretched out on her bed. Rendered in broad planes with a sense of economy partly derived from Japanese prints, the composition relies on a network of horizontal and vertical lines, superimposing the burlap cover, the blue-and-white striped straw mattress, and the gray wooden bed frame. Through a subtle play of light, the open door on the left gently shades part of the room, leaving the model’s profile in semi-darkness, elusive and somewhat enigmatic. Her semi-upright position, resting on a large, finely brushed pillow, with bare shoulders and an arm extended along her body, seems to suggest convalescence, lending a more tragic dimension to this quiet scene. By implying the vanishing of consciousness inherent to sleep, the work already engages with a theme dear to Symbolism, drawing a parallel between Wéry and his contemporaries Vuillard and Bonnard.