Henri Doucet
1883 - 1915
Portrait of the Artist's Sister

signed h. Doucet (lower right)
oil on cardboard
unframed: 62 by 45cm.; 24½ by 17¾in.
Executed circa 1912.

René Arcos
Sale, Émeraude Enchères, Saint-Malo, 2 March 2019, lot 271, (as Jeune homme attable), where acquired by the present owner

Poitiers, Poit iers Museum, Retrospective of Poitevin Paintings, Henri Doucet (1883-1915), 1948, no. 35

Henri Doucet, to Charles Vildrac, 'a letter from 11 January 1912', Crossed Destinies: The friends of Georges Duhamel and of l'Abbaye de Crétei, Champagne-sur-Oise, 2010, no. 29, p. 109, 110

The French painter and designer Henri Auguste Doucet (1883-1915) came to know Roger Fry in Paris in 1911 and was asked by Fry to come to England where he met his friends Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. He stayed at Asheham House in Sussex where his portrait was painted by Grant and Bell (the former in a French private collection; the latter sold by Bonhams (April 2024). He appears in other works by Bell and Grant. He was represented in Roger Fry’s Second Post Impressionist Exhibition (1912) with five paintings; contributed to the Omega Workshops in July 1913; and again exhibited with the Bloomsbury painters in the second Grafton Group show in January 1914.Like Duncan Grant, Doucet worked as a designer on productions mounted by the great theatre director Jacques Copeau.

Doucet and Fry became close friends and they painted together near Avignon in 1913, their landscapes reflecting mutual influence. In 1914 Doucet joined the French army and was killed in Belgium in his first week in the trenches on 5th March 1914. Fry was greatly upset by his death remarking that Doucet was someone he could talk to with ease and understanding. Doucet’s work (there is a substantial group of his paintings in the museum at Poitiers) is little known now but deserves attention.

This portrait of his sister is in his later style, characterised by flat areas of colour and simplified linear drawing. A head-and-shoulders of her is in the National Museum in Oslo.

Richard Shone