Louis-Gabriel-Eugène Isabey
(Paris 1803 - 1886 Montévrain, Seine-et-Marne)
In the Souk, Algiers. The Cloth Dyer's Stall
1830
Oil on canvas, laid down on cardboard
28.8 x 24.5 cm
SOLD
Bearing the inscription Eugène Isabey / „Les Souks" 1830 / l'echoppe du teinturier / (Voir même palette que „entrée de Mosqués" / 29 x 24,5 / (cachet de la Vente Isabey) on the verso. Labelled Museum of Modern Art / LOAN / 1981.169 / MIQUEL
Provenance:
Pierre Miquel collection, France
Exhibited:
Before Photography. Painting and the Invention of Photography, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1981, no. 26, repr. in colour p.38
Literature:
Pierre Miquel, Eugène Isabey, 1803-1886: La Marine au XIXe siècle, Paris, Mantes-la-Jolie, 1980, I, p.60, fig. 23 and II, p.121, no. 394, listed as 'Alger, les souks, l'échoppe du teinturier'
Eugène Isabey trained under his father, the miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Isabey. His regular visits to the Louvre brought him into contact with many of the leading artists of the day. His early works are predominantly landscape watercolours. In 1820 he set out on the first of his numerous study tours to Normandy and in 1825 visited England with two friends - fellow artists Eugène Delacroix and Richard Parkes Bonington. An important legacy of the trip was his new-found freedom of brushwork in his use of watercolour and greater confidence and virtuosity in his plein-air oil sketches. He returned to Normandy on several occasions, producing innumerable seascapes and studies of coastal views. He exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon in 1824 to great public acclaim.
In 1830, Isabey accompanied the French military expedition to Algeria as an official painter to the French Navy. In addition to his preparatory work for the paintings and lithographs[1] commissioned by the Royal Court he produced a group of very fine oil studies that convey the exotic, colourful impact of urban life in Algiers after the French occupation of the city in June 1830. The present oil study is one of these studies.[2] In his response to the intensity of North African light Isabey discovered a new colouristic freedom and depth, reacting in much in the same way as Delacroix.
The present painting was shown in 1981 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in the frame of the important exhibition titled Before Photography. It was curated by Peter Galassi. The exhibition also showcased work by Constable and Corot. Galassi advanced the thesis that the genesis of photography is rooted in a lengthy process of development in the history of European painting. He further argued that painting had increasingly come to reproduce the perception of a motif as seen through the artist's eye rather than as a product of the artist's imagination.
In the present sketch Isabey shows scant regard for a precise portrayal of the subject. He focuses on the picture plane in the foreground in much the same way that a photographer chooses a large aperture to produce shallow depth of field and background blur. The strips of coloured cloth hanging above the dyer's stall appear as bright patches of vivid colour. Spatial relationships are of secondary importance and are depicted in muted tones. Isabey's influence on the development of French painting was to make itself felt up to the Impressionist period.[3]
[1] See Miquel, op. cit., I, p.55f. Miquel gives a list of the artists who went on the expedition. He also publishes a letter of recommendation for Isabey addressed to Baron d'Haussez, the French Navy Minister. On his return from Algeria Isabey found it virtually impossible to sell any of the works he had produced there. Disillusioned, he turned to a different subject area - genre painting. He specialized in historicizing genre painting. He was a skilled proponent of the depiction of elegant court dress and the elaborately re-created court ceremonials of an earlier age. This was later to lead to an appointment as Louis-Philippe's court painter.
[2] See P. Miquel, op. cit., I, fig. 22, fig. 24 and fig. 115.
[3] Isabey was a friend of Eugène Boudin, Johan Barthold Jongkind was his pupil.