"Sometimes We're Ivy And Sometimes We're Oak"

Image: John Held, Jr., cover for Life magazine, 19 May 1927.

True Memories Of Tuscany

While the French had the Impressionists in the late 19th century, the Italians had the Macchiaioli, a group of artists united by their use of chiaroscuro, the effects of light and shadow, in their works. They took more inspiration from the Barbizon painters like Corot, and side-stepped Impressionism.  One of the best-known and certainly the most prolific was Giovanni Fattori  (1825-1908).   

Born in Livorno, Tuscany, Fattori found his vocation slowly.  He  arrived in Florence to study art in 1846.  There he met Edgar Degas whose work impressed him with its focus on  the loneliness and  alienation of modern life.  He was fifty by the time he finally visited Paris and remained unmoved by Impressionism, although he greatly admired Edouard Manet.

In middle age, Fattori turned to etching, publishing a portfolio in 1884 20 Ricordi del vero, or Twenty True Memories.  Scenes of deserted streets or woodland paths are the setting for solitary walkers or dogs resting in the midday sun.  These suspended moments possess a hard-won charm.  The artist lived through the turbulent years of the Italian unification, ending his years with disappointment in both society and art.  I" have spent my years hoping and I will end discouraged."  Better, surely, than the reverse.

To read more about Fattori, visit Giovanni Fattori Museum.

Images: Giovanni Fattori, Art Institute of Chicago.

1. The Black Dog.

2. Street On The Outskirts Of Florence With A Puppy.

3. A Street.

4. Woodland Walk With Figure.

"A Bouquet Of Abstract Flowers"

"Paul Valery used to say: "A woman who doesn't wear perfume has no future." Well, he was quite right." - 1966

"Women wear the perfumes they're given as presents.  You ought to wear your own, the one you like.  If I leave a jacket behind, they know it's mine." - Coco Chanel to Claude Delay, c. 1970

"When my customers come to me, they like to cross the threshold of some magic place; they feel a satisfaction that is perhaps a trace vulgar but that delights them: they are privileged characters who are incorporated into our legend.  For them this is a far greater pleasure than ordering another suit.  :legend is the consecration of fame."  - 1935

"Should you see a rooted tree/ You will always look upon yourself as being healthy/ And should there be many trees/ You goals hall soon be near." - Chanel's number five tarot card

""When did I create it (Chanel No. 5)?  In 1920, exactly; upon my return from the war.  I had been part of the campaign in a northern region of Europe, above the Arctic Circle, during the midnight sun, where the lakes and rivers exuded a perfume of extreme freshness.  I retained this note and recreated it, not without difficulty, for the first aldehydes I was able to find were unstable and unreliable.  Why this name?  Mademoiselle Chanel, who had a very fashionable couture house, asked me for some perfumes for it. " - Ernest Beaux, 1946

Coco Chanel believed in magic, as well she might, being one of its great practitioners.  Magic aside, the coutouriere  met  the perfumer  Ernest Beaux in the summer of 1920 and, delighted with the scent he offered her, called it "a bouquet of abstract flowers."  Not for Chanel the modernist, Marcel Proust's associations of scent with nostalgia. Chanel No. 5 debuted in Paris in the spring of 1921, the olfactory accessory to her modernist desings.

Ernest Beaux (1881-1961), although French,  was born in Moscow where his family were perfumers to the Tsar.   After military service on the side of the Allies during World War I, Beaux was decorated by both the British and the French.  He established his laboratory in Grasse, since the 18th century renowned as the world capitol of the perfume industry .  The flower farms of Grasse produce jasmine, a 16th century Moorish import, used in many perfumes including Chanel No. 5.  Beaux used aldehydes to fix the other ingredients in his composition: ylang-ylang, neroli, May rose, sandalwood and Bourbon vetiver.
Images:
1.  Andy Warhol - Chanel No. 5, 1965, the Andy Warhol Foundation, NYC.
2.  Georges Lepape - The Little Black Dress Goes Yellow, 1928, Conde Nast, NYC.
3.  Pierre Mourgue ( corr. 12/09/10) - Vogue cover 15 June 1928, Code Nast, NYC.
4.  Jean Pages - Vogue cover April, 1930, Conde Nast, NYC.
Youmay also be interested in French Perfume, posted here July 3, 2009.

In One Year: B.J.O. Nordfeldt, 1906

"Stories may be told much better with words. Pictures are for beauty; the feeling that they impart, not the story they tell. Pictures are like poems. A good poem doesn't tell a story; it contains beauty of rhythm." - Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt (1878-1955)

The subtle suggestiveness  of Nordfeldt's work from the year 1906 whispers the name J.A.M. Whistler.  Of course, both artists had been imprinted by their encounters with ukiyo-e prints.  Nordfeldt's family emigrated to Chicago from Tulstorg, Sweden in 1891, when Bror was thirteen and, after a stop at the Art Institute School ther from 1898 to 1900, and another one at the Académie Julian in Paris, Nordfeldt studied Japanese printing techniques with Frank Morley Fletcher in England, where he also ecnountered Whistler's prints.  Before returning to the United States, where he would lead a peripatetic life, Nordfeldt visited his grandmother in Jonstorp, Sweden, refining his woodblock working methods. 

Nothing the artist ever did, not even his experiments with the bold white line technique he crafted with the Provincetown Printers on Cape Cod  equaled the prints he made in one charmed year.  To my eyes, the subject matter that Nordfeldt instructs us to ignore looks quite like his native Sweden, filtered sometimes through the japoniste style he saw in Parisian galleries.  The waves and the drooping tree branches are fairly obvious homages, but the atmospherics Nordfeldt created with his hard-to-define hues are memorable.  It is not unusual for an artist to try one thing, and then another.  What makes Nordfelt a curious case is that neither a bolder use of color nor a turn to painting seems to have suited his talents so well.  Did he see his work as we see it?

Images:  Untitled, Figures Among the Trees, Anglers.The Mist, Waves, and Moonrise are woodblock prints by B.J. O. Nordfeldt are from the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

From An Old House In Cuesmes

"Now, if you can forgive someone for immersing himself in pictures..."

"So please don't think I am renouncing anything, I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and although I have changed, I am still the same, and what preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service in some way, how can I become more knowledgeable and study some subject or other in depth?"

- excerpts from a letter by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, July, 1880.

"Well, even in these depths of misery I felt my energy revive & said to myself, I shall get over it somehow, I shall get to work again with my pencil, which i had cast aside in my deep dejection, & I shall draw again, & ever since I have had the feeling that everything has changed for me, & now i am in my stride & my pencil has become slightly more willing & seems to be getting more so by the day.  My over-long & over- intense misery had discouraged me so much hat i was unable to do anything."

"...I cannot tell you how happy I am that I have taken up drawing again.  I had been thinking about it for a long time, but always considered it impossible & beyond my abilities.  But now, though I continue to be conscious of my failings & of my depressing dependence on a great many things, now I have recovered my peace of mind & my energy increases by the day."

"At the same time I must tell you that I cannot remain very much longer in the little room where I live now.  It is very small indeed, and then there are the two beds as well, the children's & my own.  And now that I am working on Bargue's fairly large sheets I cannot tell you how difficult it is.  I don't want to upset these people's domestic arrangements."

- excerpts from a letter by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, Cuesmes, September 24, 1880., translated from the Dutch by Arnold Pomerans in The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, New York, Penguin Books: 1996.

Cuesmes is a small village in the Walloon region of southern  Belgium.   Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) arrived from Amsterdam in 1878, to be  a worker-priest among the coal miners of the Borinage.   Emile Zola's novel Germinal (1885) is a portrait of that difficult world. In July, 1879, Van Gogh lost that job, yet another rejection for one who yearned to give of himself to other people.  After great anguish, he found a spiritual vocation in art. "I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may."

Today the old brick house gives none of that history away.

Images:

1. The Magrot House At Cuesmes - photograph by Jean-Paul Grandmont, 2006.

2. Vincent Van Gogh - Miners - September 1880, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo, Netherlands.

The Belgian Traveler: Henri Michaux

“As for yesterday’s Flemish countryside! You can’t look at it without questioning everything. These little squat houses which haven’t dared risk an extra story in the direction of heaven, and then suddenly there flames in the air the tall cone of a church steeple, as if there were only this in man capable of going up, of taking its chances on height.”

From the beginning, it was obvious that the travel writings of Henri Michaux (1899-1984) would be anything but anodyne. Before he visited Asia, India, Africa, and the interior world of drugs, Michaux visited Ecuador in 1928.  The trip, two years in the planning, was the idea of a friend.  To the question 'why Ecuador?' there is no coherent answer,  just a young man, callow and inexperienced but willing to experiment on himself, and practice "a Socratic ignorance".

“This earth has has all the exoticism washed out of it. If in a hundred year we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth’s interior, humanity is finished.”  

“Ghastly your first moment in a port. It looks as if you’ve landed in a country of engineers. Hmm! So this is what the world is like! Must you start your life all over? You walk forward awkwardly. Hmm! Finally there are some gardens and book stores and houses where no one is doing anything, and you breathe.”

“You go forward here like police detectives. Simply to sit down you have to take laboratorylike precautions. Whereas in Europe you can give yourself up to the outdoors, and exist with it on equal terms.

As for owning property here … What then? The serpent comes and kills you in your own house.”

So much for a green paradise of mountains and  rain forests, the place that disorients the normal  human relationship with the sky or, as Michaux dubbed it, 'The Dimension Crisis.'   Of course his luggage misses the only train of the week.  The inanimate world remains impervious to his search for a self.

Excerpts from Ecuador: A Travel Journal by Henri Muchaux, translated from the French by Robin Magowan, 2001 (1968 –Ediitions Gallimard, Paris) Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois.

Image: James Ensor - The Towers of Lissewege, 1890, Socinder Foundation, Berne.

La Maison Moderne

A German opens an influential gallery in Paris designed by Henvy van de Velde - and his name is not Siegfried Bing.

 Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935) opened La Maison Moderne,  a gallery of  Art Nouveau, four years after Bing's successful launch of L'Art Nouveau Bing.  When La Maison Moderne  opened its doors in September of 1899, it was intended to cater  to a younger clientele for whom influence of Asian art was a given and could be extended to innovation at home. 

The posters by Manuel Orazi and Maurice Biais are now better  known than the gallery they advertised.  Both are exceeding cleverly in the way that they wrap their human subjects into displays of art works for sale, suggesting how easily and pleasantly they could become part of your home, too.

Although La Maison Moderne operated for just four years, it was the place to find work by exciting young designers like Felix Aubert, Maurice Dufrene, Paul Follot and Abel Landry (furniture), Maurice Biais and Manual Orazi (posters) and Blanche Ory-Robin (tapestry).  In later years several of them achieved success in the Art Deco style as well. 

According to art historian John Rewald, Meier-Graefe was among the first to see in modern art  a series of formal problems to be explored, apart from the prevailing influences of the academy or nationalist politics.  To promote his ideas, Meier-Graafe had begun publishing his own avant-garde art journal, Decorative Art in 1898, as Bing had published Le Japon artistique from 1888-1891.  Meier-Graefe had been co- founder and the first art editor  for  Pan in 1895,  a journal that introduced Art Nouveau to Germany,  but he was soon dismissed for his alledged neglect of  German artists.

La Maison Moderne closed in 1903 and Meier-Graafe returned to Berlin where he published his highly original history of modern art, The Developmental History of Modern Art in 1904. When  the National Socialists took power in Germany in the early 1930s, they condemned Meier-Graefe for his support of 'decadent' art, forcing him into exile in France.  He died in Vevey, Switzerland in 1935.

The son of Edward Meier, a civil engineer, and Marie Graefe,  who died giving birth tohim, the motherless child grew up near Düsseldorf. As an adult, Julius added his mother's name to his in her memory.  At age twenty-one Meier-Graefe took up engineering to please his father, although he wanted to become a writer.  A trip from Munich to see the World's Fair of 1889 introduced him to the newest developments in engineering (think: Eiffel's tower) but it was the new art that stuck.  By 1890, back in Germany,  he began studying art history in Berlin.  He also wrote two short novels, Ein Abend bei Laura (1890) and Nach Norden (1893), both published by Fischer Verlag.

Works by many of the artists whose works were represented at La Maison Moderne are now in museum collections.  One of my favorites is Spring Garden, a tapestry by Blanche Ory-Robin, a native of Rouen.

Images:

1. Manuel Orazi -  La Maison Moderne, poster c. 1902, Municipal Library, Lyon, France.

2. unidentified photographer -Henry Van de Velde Interior, German History Documents.ghi-dc.org

3. Maurice Biais - La Maison Moderne, poster  c. 1901, Musee de la Publicite, Paris.
4. Josepf Sattler - Pan, cover for Volume I, 1895, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
5. Lovis Corinth - Portrait of Julius Meier-Graefe, 1914, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
6. Abel Landry, decorative three-panel screen, early 20th century, Lyn Knight Auctions, Lenexa, Kansas.

7. Blanche Ory-Robin (1862-1942) -  Spring Garden Tapestry, c.1910-1912, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

8. unidentified photographer - Julius Meier-Graefe in the office designed for him by Henry Van de Velde with unidentified woman, c. 1900, Boston College Archives.

You may also be interested in L'Art Nouveau According To Bing, posted here August 13, 2009.

Eglantine

In Art Nouveau we see  the beginnings of modernism, the move away from historical slavishness to realism toward abstraction and innovations in design.  Except that, sometimes, the objects make you wonder.  Here we have a lovingly rendered sketch,a souvenir for a  fin-de-siecle mural project, that looks curiously like a Renaissance plate.  The colors, the flowers, the enclosed linear patterns, are all evidence of the 'continuing curve.' See www.cooper-hewitt.org/exhibitions/

Images:

1. E. Hutre - Architectural design for a wall decoration with eglantines, peacock, cranes, and bees, c.1900, Pen and black, blue, and metallic ink, watercolor, over graphite, Metorpolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

2. Plate with bouquet of eglantines, 16 th century, National Museum of the Renaissance, Ecouen, France.

Harry Van der Weyden: American Tonalist

The first question most people ask about Harry Van der Weyden (1868-1952) is whether he was descended from the great Flemish painter Rogier Van der Weyden (c. 1399-1464).  Art historians answer with a resounding  "Maybe."

He was born in Boston, he won a scholarship to the Slade School in London at age nineteen, and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1890-1891.  Until World War I, he lived near Etaples  at Montreuil-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast.  During the war Van der Weyden worked as a camouflage officer with the British Royal Engineers from 1916 to 1918 when Etaples was a major transit point and storage depot for the British.  He died in London in 1952. Most of Van der Weyden's paintings are in private collections and tonalism, although a small part of his work, showed him at his best.  
The sun was almost below the horizon on the evening in 1898 that Van der Weyden set out to paint.   In the shadow of the cliffs at left,  two men anchor a boat while another man rows toward shore and into  the shadows. Looking closely, you find a varied palette of tones has went into the making of this lavender-blue image.  The affinity with early photography is obvious in tonalism's monochromatic effects.

 You may also be interested in Ben Foster: American Tonalist, posted here March 20, 2008.

Images:
1. Harry Van der Weyden - Landscape In Normandy, 1898, Museum of Franco-American Cooperation, Blerancourt, France.

The Old Tree In The Sun

 Belgian artists  responded to Impressionism by doing something rather different than their French neighbors, their brushwork more subdued, their effects more akin perhaps to photography.  It has been called Luminism, and it has its counterpart in America that goes by the same name.  One characteristic they share is the strength of their work compared to the blandness of their compatriots who tried to copy the French. 

It is the quality of the light that attracts me to these paintings by the Belgian Emile Claus (1849-1934).  In the 1880s, Claus bought a cottage  in Astene, near Ghent, where he lived for the rest of his life. He called it 'Villa Sunshine' in recognition the inspiration he took from the quality of  light there. 

The artist found something remarkable in the old tree, painting it repeatedly, even breaking the rule that he probably taught his own students: never put your subject directly at the center of the image.  Yet Claus persuades us as he makes light gather around the tree in The Artist's House at Astene, reflecting off the house, or as the tree  in The Tree In Autumn appears to draw the fading light of autumn into itself with its intense need.

Images:

1. Emile Claus - The Tree In The Sun, 1900, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.

2. Emile Claus - The Artist's House At Astene, 1906, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.

3. Emile Clause - Rayon de Soleil,  April 1899, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.

Pools Of Water

"Education ought to work outdoors, in the rain and the sleet, in the knife-like heat of a summertime Nebraska wheat field, along a half-abandoned railroad track on a dark autumn afternoon, on the North Atlantic in winter. All that I do is urge my students and my readers to look around, to realize how wonderfully rich is the built environment, even if the environment is only a lifeboat close-hauled in a chiaroscuro sea."  - from  Outside Lies Magic (1999), landscape historian John R. Stilgoe

From early on, photographers grasped what Stilgoe is writing about, that there is great interest in ordinary things.   Quite possibly the pleasure and serendipity of pools of water inspired landscape gardeners to create artificial ponds. 

The reflections and other effects of light are a recurring theme in photographs, regardless of style or equipment.

In Bords du Soupon, we are so concentrated on reading the upside down reflection in the puddle, that the river at right goes all but unnoticed, unless we observe the image's title.

Clumps of falling leaves in Steichen's The Pool  turn a woodland puddle into a version of a flooded plain.

The Hungarian-born Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) invented an entire grammar of rain-soaked corners.   His boat that moves on land with legs and the bird that encounters a reflected horseman capture the moments that Stilgoe reminds us are within our grasp.  Even if we forget to bring a camera.

 

Images:

1. Michel Kotchoubey - Bords du Soupon, 1894, Musee  d'Orsay, Paris.

2. Edward Steichen - The Pool, 1900, Art Institute of chicago.

3. Danilovitch Grinberg - After The Rain, early 20th century, Pompidou Center, Paris.

4. Andre Kertesz - The Boat Returns Home - Central Park, 1944, Mediatheque, Paris.

5. Andre Kertesz - Square du vert-Galant on the Ile-de-la-Citie, 1963, Pompidou Center, Paris.

A November Evening In Dordrecht

"There! See the line of lights,
A chain of stars down either side the street --" from A November Night by Sara Teasdale.

"The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;
And, if the sun looks through, 'tis with a face
Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon,
When done the journey of her nightly race,
Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place." - from November by John Clare

In the month of November it is often evening, poets remind us, as the days grow shorter and the nights extend their domain.

"VICTOR GILSOUL (1869-1939 - ed.) is one of the truest living followers of the old Flemish school. One sees reflected in his work much of the rich heritage left by the masters of Flanders–a heritage priceless in its influence on the art of all time. Born in the capital of Belgium in the year 1867, Gilsoul played as a child in an environment rich in memories of Rubens and Van Dyck. His earliest inclination was towards art, and at fourteen years of age he began his studies at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp. By the time he was fifteen he had won the first landscape prize and had seen enough of the difficult side of painting to make him determined in his desire. On returning to Brussels after barely eighteen months' study in the Antwerp Academy, he came under the influence of d'Artan and Franz Courtans, the two men who gave him his first taste of open air painting, a charm which quickly enwrapped him, and which has done more, perhaps, than anything else to determine his ambition. When seventeen years old he got his first painting admitted into the Brussels Salon–a simple little study of a wind-mill, but it won the youthful painter his first taste of public distinction, and he has ever since been well represented in the Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent Exhibitions. Gilsoul's first big success was about fifteen years ago, with a picture representing a train in a cutting at night."

- from THE ART OF VICTOR GILSOUL. by Lenore Van Der Veer, from The Studio, Volume 33, issue Number 140, November 1904.

Image: November Evening In Dordrecht, c. 1896, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

Le Trottin

He became so famous that he was known simply as Steinlen, but Swiss-born Theophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923) was also more than one artist.  Known for his stylish Art Nouveau posters and trademark cats, he was a satirist who used a nom-de-plume for fear of reprisals for his stinging commentaries.

The little errand girl trotting through the rainy night in Paris owes something stylistically to the late 19th century vogue for the ukioy-e prints of Japan.  Her clothing is proportioned and massed like a kimono, and the package she carries is alll gold and lacquer.  The undated image is from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris.

And, belatedly, here is an image that Steinlen might  well have seen from the collection of Emile Guimet.    Shoki Carrying A Woman Under An Umbrella  made in 1765 by Suzuki Haunobu,  near the time he created the first full color prints in Japan.  There are parallels between the two artists other than the color palette and the slanting lines of rain.  Harunobu also specialized in scenes of urban life and was fascinated by the personalities of young women.  In his work, it is the characters who dominate, rather than the elaboration of their clothing.

Pastilles

Pastilles were my favorite childhood candies, less much for their sweetness than for their easter-egg colors and the perfection of their circular shape.  An early lesson in inconography, as it turns out.  The circle as the ideal shape of perfection appears in religious imagery and philosophical texts numbered in mellienia, not centuries.  In Hindu and Buddhist imagery, the mandala is a circle within a square.  The Greco-Roman god Hermes Trismegistus is supposed to have said  "God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." A relatively recent example is the works of  Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), about whom more is forthcoming.            

From nameless artists of Carthage and Gaul to the refinements of the Daum Brothers of Nancy, the circle, whether applied to three dimensional objects or painted on canvas brings a feeling of harmony wherever it appears.

When the circle is made of glass it appears cosmic.  Through layering and reflection, we receive a sense of the planets and untold solar systems in motion, circles circling in space,

Images:

1. Carthage - pearlized cylinder with pastilles, c. 500 CE, Louvre Museum, Paris.

2. Gallo-Roman goblet with pastilles, 5th century, French National Museum of Archeology, Saint-Germaine-en-Laye.

3. Daum Brothers - goblet with pastilles, c. 1920-1925, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nancy.

4. Daum Brothers, goblet with pastilles, c. 1900, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nancy.

5. Jose Bezzera Diaz Lenonilson, untitled, crayon on paper, 1982, Pompidou Center, Paris.

6. Satsuma - three-tiered glazed glass boxes, Edo Period, Suntory Museum, Japan

Souvenirs Of A Friendship

“I remember my arrival in 1897 at Ernest Chausson’s villa nestled among the roses of Fiesole. Exultat! Magnificat! The gentle Florentine landscape, arriving in the light – as though one is stepping straight into an Italian Primitive painting with a young wife and a small child.” -  from Journal On Villa Papiniano by Maurice Denis, 1931.

More than three decades after his friend Chausson (1885-1899) had died in a freak accident while riding his bicycle, their all too brief friendship was still  aliving presence in the mind of the artist.  It had been a natural thing for the music publisher Henri Lerolle to introduce the music-loving painter Denis to the art-collecting composer Chausson in 1892.  The sociable Lerolle entertained a host of musicians and composers, many whose works we admire today (Vincent d'Indy, Paul Dukas, Henri Duparc, and the great Claude Debussy).

The artists Chausson collected testify to his keen eye,  being among the experimentalists of the day: Eugene Carriere,  Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Redon, Vuillard.  In 1894, he commissioned his new friend to paint ceiling panels for his home, one being April, similar to the better known  Ladder In The Foliage that Lerolle had commissioned for his ceiling in 1892. Denis gave Ladder In The Foliage an alternative title Poetic Arabesques for the Decoration of a Ceiling. 

April illustrates a line from  Parsifal, a poem by Verlaine from 1888: “And, of these voices of children singing in the cupola!” 

 Add to these, The Denis And Chausson Families On The Terrace at Fiesole, at top. The artist used his most brilliant palette for this image of a happy day.   I imagine the Chaussons at home, looking up at this charming reminder of friendship, both before and after Chausson's death.  

Images:

1. Maurice Denis - The Denis And Chausson Families On The Terrace at Fiesole, a ceiling painted for the Chausson  home, 1890s, private collection - France,  via Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Maurice Denis - April, 1894, Ernest Chausson Collection, France.
3. Maurice Denis - Ladder in The Foliage, 1892, Musee Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France.

4. Maurice Denis - The Outskirts of Fiesole, c. 1898, Bayerische State Gallery, Munich.
I am inedbted to a most informative essay by Jean-David Jameau-Lamond from the recent exhibtion on Denis at the Musee d'Orsay.