Louis Marie de Schryver

Sale: Doyle, New York, May 22, 2001, lot 162

Private collection, United States

Sale: Sotheby's New York, 9 May 1914, lot 41

Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

Louis Marie de Schryver was born in Paris in 1862 into a family of intellectuals. His father was a renowned journalist and his mother was a piano teacher. The young artist already showed great artistic talent by age 13 and astonishingly exhibited two still lifes with flowers at the official Salon, supposedly without having had any formal artistic training. Shortly thereafter, he began training under the still life and genre painter Philippe Rousseau (1816-1887). When de Schryver opened his own studio in 1886, he turned his focus toward scenes of daily life in Paris, often depicting local flower sellers with an upper-class clientele. This became his preferred subject matter for the rest of his artistic career and brought him international fame and financial stability.   

While having his own studio on rue Pergolèse in the 16^th arrondissement, De Schryver entered the atelier of orientalist portraitist Gabriel Ferrier (1847-1914) by 1891, after a long hiatus from formal training. In 1900, de Schryver was awarded the gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Despite artistic changes advanced by the avant-garde painters of the mid-late 19^th-century, De Schryver remained committed to academic traditions and continued to cater to a clientele that valued those expectations, offering an idealized and poetic image of the upper-class society he knew well.

As in the present lot, de Schryver’s bourgeois figures are young, beautiful, fashionable and seem to spend most of their time admiring and buying flowers. By choosing to endow the chic customers a slight feeling of superiority through their posture and gaze, the artist reminds the viewer of the difference in social class between customer and seller. By doing so, the artist flatters his public by comforting it with the social stereotypes of Belle Époque Paris, illustrating the sentiment of power and wealth in this dark composition lightened with the muted colors of freshly picked flowers.