Notice de l'oeuvre :
Although Dagnan-Bouveret’s painting took on a more and more marked spiritual dimension at the start of the century, the Wash house in Brittany, painted around 1907, returns to a theme that had made him known as a naturalistic artist at the end of the 1880s.
In fact, during 1887 and 1889 Dagnan-Bouveret triumphed at the Salon with the Pardon in Brittany (ill. 1) and Breton Women at the Pardon (ill. 2), which demonstrates the painter’s fascination for the old fashioned way of life of the Breton people on the eve of the second industrial revolution. The development of the western railway offered artists in search of authenticity the total escape of centuries old traditions within the borders of their own land.
A railway service to the Finistère (which means literally “the end of land”) was introduced in April 1865 with the opening of the Western line as far as Brest. In 1883, the coastal region of the Haut-Léon, isolated from the railway network until then, in turn became accessible with a new line towards the north, connecting Morlaix and Roscoff.
Unlike the paintings made the following year on the same theme by Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard (ill. 3 and 4), Dagnan- Bouveret’s Breton works are characterised by scrupulous realism in the rendering of the regional costumes, rites and architectural surroundings, giving an illusion of authenticity even though the figures shown are not “real” Bretons and the scenes described have been skilfully recomposed in the studio.
The same applies to our Breton Wash house, which depicts a very real site and activity. It is the Gourveau wash house at Saint-Pol-de-Léon in the northern Finistère. During the 19th century, Saint-Pol-de-Léon was a major location for the manufacture of linen sheets. Beyond its use in a domestic context, the Gourveau wash house was also used to bleach the fibres used for this flourishing textile industry.
The steeple visible in the background belongs to the Notre- Dame-du-Kreisker chapel, a major example of Breton religious architecture.
Its metre granite spire is the tallest gothic monument in Brittany, “the strongest piece of architecture the eye has ever seen,” according to Vauban. The Gourveau wash house is no longer in use, but has miraculously escaped the ravages of time, thus confirming our identification (ill. 5). A postcard from the early 20th century shows it fully operational and allows the photographic precision of Dagnan- Bouveret to be appreciated in his description of the surrounding architecture and the even the gestures of the workers kneeling around the basin to rub the linen sheets (ill. 6).
This keen eye confirms the artist’s specific way of working. Far from capturing the scene in situ, Dagnan-Bouveret meticulously prepares his compositions with several drawings and photographs made in situ, during his many trips to Brittany from 1885, and at his studio at Quincey, in Haute-Sâone. In this scene from Breton daily life, some washerwomen literally stand out from the rest of the composition. They are shown with great precision, both in their poses and their costumes and features. This is the case for the two women in the left foreground, also for the older one, who is stretching a sheet in front of her, and lastly for the washerwoman carrying a basket on her head on the right of the basin. The simultaneous focus on these three groups placed away from the centre and shown in action, forms a contrast with the voluntarily blurred rendering of the moving washerwomen and lends this painting a photographic dimension. The impression of assembling and pause that emerges from this painting constitutes one of Dagnan-Bouveret’s trademarks. Far from directly recording
a scene on the spot, he recreates an illusion of reality by combining independent fragments in a much more analytical manner. While the site itself and the gestures of the washerwomen at work must have been observed on site and immortalized by drawings and photographs, the perfectly individualized faces and sophisticated poses of the three independent groups reveal long working sessions in the studio. The Dagnan-Bouveret collection in the archives of the Haute-Saône contains many photographs that illustrate this working method, especially for the Pardon in Brittany (ill. 1). For example, the artist can be seen at his easel, in the studio at Quincey in the Haute-Saône, with his wife Maria Walter posing in regional costume for one of the figures in the middle ground of the Pardon in Brittany (ill. 7).
Dagnan-Bouveret’s naturalism, which contemporaries praised in his capacity to convey true Breton character23, is in fact skilful staging in which the décor and costumes are actually authentic while the parts are given not to natives, but to models close to the painter.
It is likely that the washerwoman seen in profile on the left foreground and the one carrying her basket in the middle ground on the right are not two peasants from Saint-Pol-de-Léon but Maria Walter posing in her husband’s studio wearing regional costume. Her brown hair, aquiline nose and dark eyebrows can be recognized in several Breton works by the artist (ill. 8 and 9).
On the right of the painting another figure grasps our attention. It is the old woman whose slightly skewed position is reminiscent of the figure in the foreground of the Pardon in Brittany (ill. 1)24. Unlike the Metropolitan painting, our Wash House is a subject that seems purely profane. However, Dagnan has succeeded in introducing to it a slight inkling of religiosity with the pose and gesture of the washerwoman who is stretching a white sheet in front of her, like a modern Veronica, the patron saint of laundrywomen. This combination of naturalism and symbolism constitutes one of the characteristics of Dagnan- Bouveret’s art from the 1890s on. The painter, who is rapidly categorized in an immutable naturalist movement, was not insensitive to the Impressionists’ considerations either. Thus he uses pure almost acid colour to depict the organic elements in the composition: the azure water in the basin, the vivid green of the vegetation and the bright yellow of the bouquets of gorse; while the sky and the stony areas (granite of the walls and slate of the manor’s roof) are painted in muted tones. The textual sources tell us that this theme of Breton washerwomen was depicted by Dagnan-Bouveret on several occasions. The first occurrence is in the catalogue of the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts that was held in 1895. The artist, who was also a member of this institution, presented a painting entitled “Breton Women at the Wash House”25. However the catalogue does not provide either the dimensions or a description of this lost composition. The second one appears in the catalogue of the Universal Exposition of 1900, where Dagnan-Bouveret exhibited seven paintings including a Wash House in Brittany belonging to a French actor called Coquelin Aîné. Famous for having created the role of Cyrano de Bergerac in Edmond Rostand’s play, Constant Coquelin (1841-1909) had an important collection of contemporary paintings dispersed in Paris at three auctions26.
The Breton Wash House appeared in the third sale, held on 3 June 1909. The illustrated catalogue of the auction includes an image of his work and tells us that the painting was dated 1894, which suggests that it could be the Breton Women at the Wash House exhibited at the Salon of the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts en 1895 (ill.10).
At the second auction of the Coquelin collection in 1906, a second painting of this theme appeared, which this times depicts a group of Breton Women at a Fountain (ill. 11). This painting, which is also lost, was made in 1903 as a pendant to the previous Wash House of 1894 bought by Coquelin.
Our Wash House in Brittany is mentioned in a third textual source that has generously been made known to us by Gabriel and Yvonne Weisberg. It is in Dagnan- Bouveret’s correspondence in the Archives Départementales of the Haute-Sâone and studied by Pauline Grisel in an unpublished dissertation27. There we learn that the Comte Théodule de Grammont, owner of the Château of Villersexel in Haute-Sâone, who met the painter in 1905 and may have seen Coquelin’s pendants, commissioned a wash house from Dagnan. The painter went to Brittany in July and August 1906 to prepare his composition: “The sky didn’t grant me the clouds for which I asked. I could only draw my motif and rub it vaguely in the effect. This was in any case sufficient for my summer’s work in terms of installation. I will return to it later.”28
With the studies made in situ, the artist then returned to the Haute-Sâone to create his painting in his studio at Quincey, during the summer of 1907. The stamp of the dealer in colours Hardy- Alan, visible on the stretcher, confirms this date. According to the address given, this stamp was applied around 1907, when the company moved to 92 boulevard Raspail (ill. 12).
In October 1907, the sky of Quincy finally provided the painter with the Breton light that he had waited for in vain at Saint-Pol:
“If you have extended, it is because you have finally the grey weather you desire so much... the wash house will have benefited from it.”29
The correspondence tells us that Dagnan-Bouveret returned to Saint-Pol-de-Léon in November 1907 to finish his “ravishing Wash House”30. This sheds a new light on the artist’s reconstructed naturalism, for whom it was not sufficient to take notes in situ and then
to create the composition entirely “outside the territory” in his studio in the Haute-Sâone. He returned to the location to compare this reconstitution with reality.
Lilas Sharifzadeh
23. Cf. G. Ollendorff, Salon de 1887, Paris, 1887, p. 73.
24. Yet again, it is not a Breton woman who posed for this figure but Jeanne-Claude Jobard, mother of the painter Gustave Courtois, a very close friend of Dagnan.
25. It is n°354 ter, according to a handwritten reference that appears on a copy of the catalogue of the Salon des Beaux-Arts of 1895 that is not illustrated (Evreux, Ch. Hérissey, 1895), kept at the library of the Musée d’Orsay. According to the illustrated catalogue (Paris, typographie Chamerot et Renouard, 1895), Dagnan-Bouveret presented Washerwomen under number 358 bis.
26. 27 May 1893, 9 June 1906 and 3 June 1909.
27. Pauline Grisel, P.A.J. Dagnan-Bouveret à travers sa correspondance, DEA d’Histoire de l’Art, Université Lyon II Lumière, supervised by Mady Menier, 1987.
28. Cf. Letter to Amic, 26 August 1906, cited by Grisel, op. cit., p. 70 and n.2.
29. Cf. Letter from the Comte de Grammont to Dagnan, cited by Grisel, op. cit., p. 70
30. Cf. P. Grisel, ibid.
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