Le grand bassin de Marquayrol vers la maison
Oil on canvas, signed lower right
95 x 79 cm
Provenance :
Private collection, France
Certificate of inclusion in the archives used to draw up the catalogue raisonné of Henri Martin issued by Marie-Anne Destrebecq-Martin.
Henri Martin at Marquayrol: the painter in his garden
In 1899, Henri Martin acquired a large estate of almost 30 hectares in Labastide-du-Vert in the Lot department. The studio he had built on the hill overlooking the Vert valley offered spectacular views. The surroundings of the house have also been designed as small theatres. The light, sometimes golden in autumn, brighter in spring, and sometimes snow, dress up these settings: the pergolas and vines, the three ponds, the gate, the terrace, the opening into the garden from the house, all become recurring motifs in the painter's work, selected fragments that give him the opportunity to exercise his palette and his brushes. Henri Martin seemed to have found everything he needed at Marquayrol, and from 1923 onwards, he never really left the house, where until then he had spent only part of the year, from spring to autumn. Like Monet at Giverny, and his friend Le Sidaner at Gerberoy, Henri Martin saw his estate as an inexhaustible field of pictorial interest, to which he would devote himself for the rest of his life.
Such was the importance of these gardens in the painter's work that a very large number of his paintings are devoted to them, variations in which the light flickers lightly on the foliage or spreads over the red vine, which is dying for the season.
Around the half-moon-shaped pond facing the house, the coping is dotted with pots of geraniums, like red and pink ornaments in the buttonhole of a suit of exuberant greenery. Also on its pedestal is the sculpture of a Child with a Goose, a Roman replica of a Greek statue whose reproduction was so fashionable in the 19th century that it was chosen to adorn the surrounds of the Marquayrol pond.
Today, more than eighty years after the artist's death, Henri Martin's gardens are coming back to life thanks to a group of enthusiasts united around the estate's new owners. Long left to their own devices, the painter's colourful flowerbeds are being brought back to life, almost identically, thanks to... paintings! From ephemeral models, the flowers, once painted, have attained immortality and can in turn breathe new life into the settings imagined by Henri Martin.