Henri-Jean-Guillaume Martin French, 1860-1943

Collection Périnet, Paris

Anderson Galleries & Hammer Galleries ed., Eden Close at Hand: The Paintings of Henri Martin 1860-1943, Beverly Hills, 2005, p. 66, mentioned 

Original canvas. There is a small spot of retouching towards the lower left corner corresponding to some paint loss, otherwise the work is in good condition with bright colours and fine texture throughout. Held within a simple gilt wood frame.
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Painted circa 1900, the present work is one of the last in a series of allegorical figures and muses that Martin produced in the 1890s.

Henri Martin was particularly fond of the theme of the muse - signifier of artistic inspiration - in the form of a beautiful young woman 'visiting' the artist. He first explored the subject in 1885 in the painting Le Philosophe ou L'Inspiration du poète. In the present work the figure of the muse similarly floats in mid-air like a vision, dramatically lit from the side; the posture of the muse compares to another work of 1900, La Beauté.

In 1895 Martin executed a mural for the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, in which he represented his teacher Jean-Paul Laurens, the sculptor Jean Dampt, and the composer Claude Debussy in a sacred grove where they were visited by Inspiration and the Muses. Following this commission, Martin had his first retrospective in a commercial gallery, the Galerie Mancini in Paris in 1896. From then on, and before his change in direction towards more contemporary subject matter and pure landscape, his Symbolist paintings increasingly depicted allegorical compositions with single female figures.