During the forty years of his artistic career Henri Le Sidaner’s home at Gerberoy played an important role in his oeuvre. Like Monet at Giverny , he devoted himself to creating an elegant, harmonious house and garden taking a direct interest in every aspect of its development and design, he once stated: ‘In my morning prayers there is a grand and beautiful garden; a bay of hawthorns surrounded by trembling branches, a song of distant voices, the delightful whisper of fountains, and between the earth and the sky only the glorious sun’. At Gerberoy Le Sidaner constructed a terraced garden with a variety of striking architectural features, local artisans were used to execute his plans and he paid great attention to even the smallest detail.

Henri Le Sidaner’s distinctive, poetic style is often described in terms of musicality and silence. Always in a ‘minor key’; its subtle harmonies are seen to evoke a wistful mood that is often enhanced by the absence of figures, Paul Signac noted: ‘His oeuvre displays a taste for tender, soft and silent atmospheres. Gradually, he even went so far as to eliminate all human presence from his pictures, as if he feared that the slightest human form might disturb their muffled silence’ (quoted in Yann Farinaux Le Sidaner, Le Sidaner, op cit p 31).

HENRI LE SIDANER
Port-Louis 1862 - 1939 Versailles

Henri Le Sidaner was born on the island of Mauritius in 1862. At the age of ten his family moved to Dunkirk and in 1880 Le Sidaner left for Paris where he was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1882. He studied under Alexandre Cabanel until 1885 during which time he discovered the work of Edouard Manet whose Bar aux Folies Bergeres was to have a profound influence on his artistic development. Cabanel was strongly opposed to the work of the Impressionists which led Le Sidaner to break away from the strict regime of his atelier and move to Etaples where he began to develop the individual technique which was to become his own personal style in the years to come.

Le Sidaner travelled extensively throughout his life, visiting Holland, Belgium, Venice, London and New York; he also moved constantly throughout France. In 1900 he visited the tiny village of Gerberoy (Seine et Oise) where he later bought the house which became the inspiration for many of his paintings and where he painted his beautiful still lifes. He exhibited at the Paris Salon, the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris and the Goupil Gallery in London.

Although the work of Henri Le Sidaner appears to be impervious to the artistic changes taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century he was not totally unaffected by the development of Impressionism and neo-Impressionism. His work is very much in the realist style but at the same time evocative and poetic, if combines a dreamy quality with a technical expertise and his atmospheric paintings, whether they be landscapes or still lifes, are symptomatic of his unique personal vision.