110 - Study, Brittany, 1892

Study, Brittany, 1892 Pencil on paper 11.5 x 9 cm Vertical monogram stamp in the lower right corner: MAUD Provenance: Maurice Denis Collection Private collection For Maurice Denis, Brittany was never merely a vacation destination. For more than half a century, it was his chosen home, where family life, observation of the landscape, and studio work were closely intertwined. From his youth onward, the artist discovered a region to which he would return almost every summer—from Perros-Guirec to Le Pouldu, from Loctudy to Binic—before making Perros and his villa Silencio one of his most cherished home bases. This loyalty, however, was not driven by any desire for picturesque scenery. Denis arrived in Brittany with the eye of a painter already immersed in the Nabi movement and following in the footsteps of his friends, foremost among them Paul Sérusier. The region of Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu, shaped by the influence of Gauguin and his companions, offered him not so much a model to imitate as a space of freedom: a natural world whose forms, rhythms, and colors could be arranged according to an inner vision. His stay in Le Pouldu in 1899 provides one of the most eloquent examples of this. That year, Denis stayed there with his family and made his immediate surroundings the very substance of his work. Marthe Denis and their children appear at the heart of a series of compositions in which the beach, the sea, and the domestic interior no longer form distinct settings, but rather the elements of a single sensory universe. Brittany thus became the setting for a painting of the intimate, without ever being reduced to mere anecdote. The large compositions from Le Pouldu, such as *Maternité au Pouldu, effet du soir* (now in the collection of the Musée de Pont-Aven) and *Les Baigneuses, plage du Pouldu* (in the collection of the Petit Palais), attest to this ability to transform lived experience into a pictorial composition of remarkable coherence. Memories of his stay, the figures of his loved ones, and sketches made on location are freely reimagined by the artist, who replaces mere description with a vision in which the landscape becomes a natural extension of family life. It is within this context that *Red Farmhouse at Le Pouldu*, painted around 1899 and offered in this sale, finds its place. By its very subject matter, the work recalls Denis’s focus on the concrete reality of the Breton countryside; through its visual language, it belongs to that period when the landscape was already subject to a deeply personal syntax of forms and colors. The farmhouse here is not merely an ethnographic document: it becomes a pictorial motif, a point of balance between architectural solidity, the rhythm of the terrain, and the intensity of color. The works and studies gathered here thus bear the imprint of a Brittany that was traveled, observed, and lived. They stem from those summers when the painter’s work was never quite separate from the presence of her family, when walks, beaches, and landscapes nourished a daily practice of drawing and painting. Their preservation within the artist’s family adds a special dimension to this collection: that of a family memory that has remained deeply connected to the very places that inspired it. From the most spontaneous sketches to fully realized compositions, these drawings and works offer a glimpse into one of the most enduring themes in Maurice Denis’s imagination. Brittany appears here alternately familiar and transformed, observed in the simplicity of its landscapes and reinvented through painting. For the artist, it was as much a place of work as it was a place to live—and it is precisely in this continuity between his work and his life that the singular coherence of his vision lies.