Henri le Sidaner – Soir de Printemps

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

(Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast)

Henri le Sidaner, Soir de Printemps, c. 1920

Henri le Sidaner is amongst my new favourite artists because his paintings are just so damn dreamy and this painting, “Soir de Printemps” is no exception. The painting shows a view of the houses and blooming trees one evening in spring. Henri le Sidaner loved painting landscapes and gardens, overall he had a penchant for portraying places uninhabited by people or even animals, places which he could then, using the colours of his emotions, transform into landscapes and gardens of his dreams. The mood of his paintings is often dreamy, tinged with an inexplicable melancholy and a sense of beauty inevitably passing away, just like the warmth of summer does. In “Soir de Printemps” there is dreaminess, but no sadness. I dare say there is even a sense of excitement, and surely the painter must have felt excited as he gazed at this scene himself. An evening in spring is made for daydreams and the heart is filled to the brim with the beauty and fragrance of the blooming trees, and we are eager to take in all this transient beauty before the petals fall off, or are carried away by the wind. The houses with windows here and there from which a warm yellow lighth can be seen, and the trees in bloom create a lovely pattern and almost nothing else apart from these two motifs can be scene. The colour palette of lilac, grey, and blue perfectly encapsulated that hazy moment when the evening is falling in spring, as if the fairies themselves have woven a magical cloak and are covering the entire nature with it. I love the softness and vagueness of the scene, it is painted as if the painter was seeing the world through a gauze curtain. The tender, transient beauty of the blooming trees of early spring is truly unparalleled, especially after long, dreary months of winter.

Wined and dined, oh it seemed just like a dream (Henri Le Sidaner)

“Wined and dined
Oh it seemed just like a dream
Girl was so kind
Kind of love I’d never seen

Only last summer, it’s not so long ago
Just last summer, now musk winds blow…“

(Syd Barrett, Wined and Dined)

Henri Le Sidaner, Table with Lanterns in Gerberoy, 1924

These late summer days when the air is tinged with a sense of transience, and I am haunted by the memories, the paintings of Henri La Sidaner have been on my mind a lot. Their quiet, slightly mysterious and intimate mood is strangely comforting when I am feeling the way I am feeling these days. It almost seems to represent an image from my memory, or not even memory alone, for nothing is as beautiful in real life, but an embellished memory, a made up memory of a life that never was but a memory that feeds me and helps me live through the days. One motif that repeats itself all throughout Le Sidaner’s painting is that of an empty space and I think that this, amongst other things, is something that gives his paintings that mysterious, slightly ethereal quality. Quiet interiors and quiant street scenes were his favourites motifs to paint but these are always empty spaces and this absence of people, or anything living really, is what draws me to these paintings. Let’s take a look at the painting “Table with Lanterns in Gerberoy” painted in 1924, which seems to be my favourite for a long time now. A simple scene but beautifully atmospheric. A table laid out for people; wine bottles, glasses, fruits, a jug, and a vase with roses. In the background a house with windows overgrown with roses. Colourful paper lanterns. Some clothes laid out over the chairs as if someone had just left the scene. I can still hear the music in the air, melancholy violins and the sounds of crickets, and perhaps a distant sound of a woman’s laughter. But… where are the people? Who knows. Are the roses still echoing with the words from the party guests’ conversations, or are they yet to see the guests? Is the wine in the glasses half-drunk or has it only been half-poured? There is always a hint of someone’s presence in Le Sidaner’s art but never a face painted directly, and I think it better that way because this allows for the mystery and the dreaminess which is the ultimate charm of this painting and many other of his.

Henri le Sidaner, The Table in the Gerberoy Garden at Dusk, 1900s

Henri Le Sidaner, La Table, 1901

Henri Le Sidaner, La petite table, 1920

Henri Le Sidaner, Small Table in Evening Dusk, 1921

Henri Le Sidaner, La Gloriette, Gerberoy, 1929

This painting, and some of Le Sidaner’s similar dinner table in the garden scenes, always bring to mind a song from one of Syd Barrett’s solo albums, one of my personal favourites as well, “Wined and Dined” from the album “Barrett” (1970). The song, just like Le Sidaner’s painting, has that melancholy feeling of a beauty that simply cannot be preserved, the height of such beauty, the most raw; summer that is ending soon, a flower that is wilting, something beautiful is passing and there is nothing one can do to prevent it and it aches the heart like nothing else. In this sense, I am also reminded of Watteau’s paintings, the fragile and delicate worlds of beauty, where beautifully clad ladies and cheerful harlequins engage eternally in a game of love and joy, but still there is a whisper of sadness in the trees. An idyllic garden party on a summer eve is an example of such beauty; a moment in time when one can wine and dine freely and the autumn is not yet there to brush one’s cheek with its cold breath, the leaves are the strongest and greenest, and one cannot imagine that they will ever fall down, the music of the crickets is there and it soothes the ear, and everything seems possible and everlasting. To encapsulate such a moment and live in it would be a dream.

Henry Kirke White – The Dance Of The Consumptives

Today I wanted to share some a beautiful and eerie fragment of an unfinished drama called “The Dance of the Consumptives” written by a rather obscure English poet Henry Kirke White (1785-1806) said to have been written n his earlier phase though I am not sure how old he would have been exactly because he died so young as it is. You can read the whole text of this eccentric unfinished drama here.

Henri Le Sidaner, Ronde des jeunes filles, crayon graphite, 1897

These lines specifically have been haunting me for some time now, but now, at last, the perfect imagery came to my mind. The drama is about death arriving dressed as consumption to flush a young girl’s cheek and take her away to the other world. Dancing young girls in drawings of the French painter Henri Le Sidaner perfectly fit the mood of the drama. With their pale attire and fluid, ghostly forms they almost looks like ghostly maidens who fell prey to the consumption and have now arrived to welcome a new soul into their eerie, ghostly circle dance:

In the dismal night air dress’d,
I will creep into her breast:
Flush her cheek, and bleach her skin,
And feed on the vital fire within.
Lover, do not trust her eyes,—
When they sparkle most, she dies!
Mother, do not trust her breath,—
Comfort she will breathe in death!
Father, do not strive to save her,—
She is mine, and I must have her!
The coffin must be her bridal bed!
The winding-sheet must wrap her head;
The whispering winds must o’er her sigh,
For soon in the grave the maid must lie:
The worm it will riot
On heavenly diet,
When death has deflower’d her eye.

Henri Le Sidaner, La Ronde, c 1900