Louise-Alexandra Desbordes-Jouas 1848-1926

A student of the Imperial Conservatory and gifted with a contralto voice, Louise-Alexandra Desbordes-Jouas initially pursued a career in opera at the Paris Opera, where she was engaged in 1868, before turning exclusively to painting in 1872. She studied under the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, then at the height of his fame, and it was in his studio that she met Louise De Hem, Alix d’Anethan, and Berthe Art.

Desbordes exhibited for the first time at the Salon in 1876, presenting flower bouquets as well as striking nocturnal landscapes and portraits that enjoyed a certain success, earning her an honorable mention in 1880 and again at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Praised early on by Huysmans and collected by figures such as Charles Hayem and Sarah Bernhardt, with whom she developed a friendship, she also contributed to Belgian artistic life by participating from 1878 in the triennial Salon of Brussels, and in the exhibitions of the Cercle des femmes peintres in 1888 and 1890. Quickly associated with the Symbolist movement, she joined the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1890 and, from 1893 onward, exhibited with the Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs at the Galerie Georges Petit. Desbordes was also part of the female group “Les Quelques,” which exhibited from 1908 at the Galerie des artistes modernes on rue Caumartin, alongside sculptors Jane Poupelet and Marie Cazin, and painters Louise Galtier-Boissière and Clémentine-Hélène Dufau.

With its atmosphere of mist and mystery, this small landscape belongs to the most Symbolist aspect of Louise Desbordes’ work. In a semi-oval format resembling an open window, the artist presents a view of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, seen from the Quai de la Tournelle. The two towers and the spire of the imposing Gothic edifice dominate the Pont de l’Archevêché, the Seine, and its banks, all shrouded in the soft vapor of an early misty evening. The architectural forms, the water, and the sky blend into delicate harmonies of gray tones, lightly touched with hints of gold that a hidden setting sun struggles to spread.

It was precisely these unique qualities that early drew the attention of Arsène Alexandre in the pages of the Figaro:

“Mme Louise Desbordes should be very well known and greatly appreciated, given the long time she has asserted her independent nature, entirely devoted to rich colors and dreamlike visions: fantastic landscapes, water flowers, visions - naturally one thinks of Gustave Moreau, yet it is something else entirely.” 

This painting may have been among the Parisian landscapes exhibited after 1900 at the Union des femmes peintres show at the Galerie Georges Petit, as several contemporary reviews suggest. Alexandre praised “the paintings of Mme Louise Desbordes, [….] executed with a rare concern for precious material: […] fantastic and true landscapes, of which Paris is the theme - in short, the work or the discoveries of a true artist.” The poet Jean Lorrain, seemingly struck with ecstasy, was even more enthusiastic, associating Desbordes’ work with Whistler’s celebrated nocturnes: 

“A precious, hallucinatory landscape represents the quays of Paris as seen from the Pont de Sully, a Paris of mist and dream at the hour when the first gas lamps are lit - and this student of Stevens reminds me for the first time of Whistler.”