Henry Moret, an impressionist painter facing Breton nature, maritime or bucolic

Through two landscapes, Henry Moret depicts an authentic Brittany. With his impressionistic touch, he pays tribute to a country to which he is intimately linked, inviting us to pure contemplation.

Henry Moret’s landscapes elude anecdote and tend towards universality. Although they are almost all painted in Brittany, it is often difficult to situate them exactly. This is the case for one of the two paintings presented at this Brest sale, Gros temps, côte de Bretagne (60 x 80 cm), expected to fetch €80 ,000/100 ,000. The painter opens a “window” on nature, as the poet Henri Eon put it. Although human beings are absent from many of his panoramas, two men have a front-row seat to this maritime spectacle, observing a raging sea and a tumultuous sky. It was 1909 when Moret painted this picture. Since 1895, when he met the art dealer Durand-Ruel, he had gradually abandoned the synthétisme he had learned alongside Gauguin in Pont-Aven, and returned to Impressionism. He never completely abandoned it, however, as he exhibited regularly with the Parisian gallery owner Le Barc de Boutteville, alongside the masters of the genre and the Symbolists. Durand-Ruel acquired no less than six hundred and fifty of his paintings and devoted exhibitions to him, both in Paris and New York. Comma-shaped brushstrokes, preferred to flat areas of color, now invade his canvases and take on increasing freedom over the years. Nevertheless, his constructions are always well-balanced and directed by large diagonal lines.

Painted three years before his death, this painting stands out from the rest of his corpus, as it plunges us right into the heart of the forest, in an unspoilt, bucolic setting.

“Henry Moret is the whole of Brittany”.

Although he tended to reduce his palette to his fetish colors of pink and green, Henry Moret still knew how to make tones vibrate with each other, as demonstrated by Rivière de Pont-Aven, Finistère, where the waters play with warm and cold colors and transparency effects. The work confirms Émile Bernard’s judgment of his friend’s stylistic orientation : “He had turned from our synthetic research to Monet’s plein-air school, and that was a surprise to me. […] Far from having weakened his talent, he had strengthened it, far from theories, to life itself, to nature.” Painted three years before its author’s death, this painting stands out from the rest of his corpus, as it plunges us into the heart of the forest, in a preserved, bucolic setting. It is also a reminder of Moret’s eternal attachment to the little Breton town, which made him the painter he wanted to be. He discovered Pont-Aven as early as 1876, during his military service, and returned there after his training in Paris. He met Gauguin there in 1888, by which time he was already a regular visitor : he didn’t stay at the inn like the newcomers, but rented a studio from the harbor master M. Kerluen, with whom he often went sailing and fishing. Henry Moret was a simple, discreet man, living as close to nature as possible. Settled in Doëlan from 1896, he lived in Finistère, 20 kilometers from Lorient and 15 kilometers from Pont-Aven, making it easy for him to get to his favorite places, which he continued to depict until the end of his life, not in a regionalist or folkloric way, but with a timeless spirit of belonging. Thus, in 1959, Henry Hugault wrote in the preface to an exhibition dedicated to the painter by the Durand-Ruel gallery : “Henry Moret is all of Brittany, Brittany is all of Henry Moret.

Also read Henry Moret twice in Ouessant

Modern paintings, Breton schools (Second vacation)

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Henry Moret