Henri Lerolle
Henri Lerolle’s Impressionist still-life is a modern layout with a virgule touch.
Oil on panel
Monogrammed H.L lower right
Dimensions: 27 x 22.5 cm
sold
The apple, with its many symbols, is often depicted in paintings.
From the Middle Ages to the present day, apples have long been depicted in paintings. It is the symbol of earthly life, its pleasures and excesses, the passing of time, the fragility of matter, the brevity of life.
Artists have loved to paint this fruit with its pure, graphic and colorful forms. Cézanne himself proclaimed, “With an apple, I want to astonish Paris!”
Henri Lerolle, a timeless impressionist still life.
Henri Lerolle delivers a modern, timeless still life.
No basket, no plate, just the two-tone red and yellow apples on the grass.
Using a virgule touch, the painter works with the material of the fruit and the grass on which it rests.
Biography
Impressionist painter Henry Lerolle trained at the Charles Suisse Academy, then entered Louis Lamothe’s studio at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts. 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.
Exhibitions
Bibliography
– Gérard Schurr, Pierre Cabane, Dictionnaire des petits maîtres de la peinture, 1820-1920, t. II, Paris, Editions of the amateur, 1996
Value of Tomorrow, Les Éditions de L’Amateur, Volume V
Museums
– In Paris: Museum of Modern Art; The Petit Palais.
– In the provinces: Carcassonne, Mulhouse, Nice, Orléans, Le Havre.
– International:
. New York,Metropolitan Museum,
. Boston, Minneapolis,
. Bucharest,
. Budapest; National Museum,
