HENRY MORET | Gros temps à Doëlan, Bretagne

Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the artist in January 1910)
Alexandre Farra, Paris
Acquired by the present owner in 2017

Please contact the Impressionist and Modern Art Department (Phoebe.Liu@sothebys.com) for the condition report for this lot.
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Henry Moret’s lifelong attraction to the wild seas and rugged coastline of Brittany began whilst he was stationed there on military service in 1875. The dramatic landscapes of the region instantly captivated him, and other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists including Claude Monet. When Monet arrived in September 1886 he was inspired to create a series of seascapes capturing the effects of the ever changing light and weather upon the rough seas. The village of Pont-Aven became a thriving artistic community and Moret found a permanent home there in 1888.  Whilst Moret’s earlier works reflect the Synthetic style of fellow Pont-Aven artists Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. His later works express a more impressionistic vocabulary. Émile Bernard describes this transition, writing of Moret: ‘He was a very gentle, likeable character; a peaceable, sincere revolutionary. I lost sight of him when I left Pont-Aven […] He had turned away from our developments in Synthesis and gone over to the plein-air school of Monet […] So far from weakening his talent he had strengthened it, rejecting theories, keeping in touch with life itself, with nature’ (quoted in Wladyslawa Jaworska, Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School, London, 1972, p. 183-84.)

Painted in 1909, Gros temps à Doëlan, Bretagne was undoubtedly inspired by Monet with his Bretagne canvases in mind. Here the vibrancy and clarity of the light, the translucency of the water and the charging motion of the waves form the artist’s primary focus, a moment of atmospheric interplay captured in characteristically lively and loose brushstrokes.  



This work will be included in the Catalogue raisonné being prepared by Jean-Yves Rolland.