Henry Lerolle
Mme Lerolle dans son intérieur by Henry Lerolle. A scene of daily life treated with great delicacy by the artist.
Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 61.5 x 50.5 cm
With frame: 78 x 68 cm
Old exhibition label on back
Price: €18,000
Our painting can be compared with“L’intérieur”, which was donated to the Musée du Petit Palais by Jean Marie Rouart, great-grandson of the painter Henri Lerolle.
Henry Lerolle is a naturalist painter on the fringe of the impressionist movement.
Henry Lerolle painted outdoor scenes of women at work, shepherds, water carriers, harvesters in the countryside.
In the 1890s, Lerolle moved into a private register, with interior scenes and portraits, most often depicting his wife Madeleine or his daughters Yvonne and Christine, as shown in our painting.
Mme Lerolle in her home, an intimate scene.
Henry Lerolle paints his wife in their home, busy folding laundry. Here, the painter gives us a picture of intimacy, a moment in life captured and transcribed by the artist with great naturalness. Madame Lerolle is concentrating on her task, a dresser drawer is open, a few fabrics are on the floor…
You can recognize the family world of Avenue Duquesne in Paris, an interior of discreet luxury with family furniture and walls wallpapered with light yellow wallpaper by William Morris.
A reference to 17th-century Dutch genre painting.
This work evokes Dutch genre painting, one of the most poetic in the history of art, and in particular the works of Vermeer, depicting ordinary, intimate scenes of daily life, with inward-looking figures concentrating on their manual tasks. We also find a door opening onto another room in the house, and daylight filtering through a window creating depth.
Biography
Henry Lerolle trained at the Academy of Charles Switzerland and then entered the School of Fine Arts in Paris in the studio of Louis Lamothe. He debuted at the Salon of 1868. He exhibited regularly at the National Society of Fine Arts where he obtained numerous distinctions, including a gold medal in 1900.
Henry Lerolle surrounds himself with artists whose works he collects, musicians and writers like Degas, Monet, Renoir, Maurice Denis, Gustave Moreau. Violinist and amateur composer, it was through his wife, Madeleine Escudier, that he was introduced to contemporary music. He became Claude Debussy’s friend and forged relations with Henri Dupais, Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky.
His two daughters married the sons of his friend the industrialist and collector Henri Rouart. They pose for Edgard Degas, Renoir, Maurice Denis or Albert Besnard.
Henry Lerolle produced numerous wall decorations, often of religious inspiration. One of his earliest works, in 1874, was the Baptism of the Martyrs of Créteil, which decorated the baptismal font chapel of Créteil’s Saint-Christophe church.
At the 1878 Salon, he presented a monumental easel painting, Communion of the Apostles, commissioned by the City of Paris for the Saint-François-Xavier church in Paris.
In 1888, he executed another monumental painting, Communion, again for Saint-François-Xavier, now preserved in the sacristy.
He switched to mural painting in 1896 with his Calvaire on the walls of the Dames-du-Calvaire chapel, in the Jeanne-Garnier medical center in Paris’s 15th arrondissement.
Bibliography
– Gérard Schurr, Pierre Cabane, Dictionnaire des petits maîtres de la peinture, 1820-1920, t. II, Paris, Les Editions de l’Amateur, 1996
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– Valeur de Demain, Les Éditions de L’Amateur, Tome V
