Skippings Fine Arts has dated this French Impressionist Nude Painting to the 1880s.
The work is imbued with a wonderful sense of narrative poetry and light. Dauvergne’s mastery is most evident in the rendering of the bather’s skin tones, which glow with a pearlescent quality against the textured bark of the willow tree—a testament to his training under the great Thomas Couture.
Louis Dauvergne was a figure of contradictions. The son of a landowner, he famously rejected his inheritance of the family farm to pursue a life of art in Paris. There, he joined the elite studio of Thomas Couture, where he studied alongside Puvis de Chavannes and Édouard Manet.
Possessing a private income, Dauvergne was a "painter’s painter" who worked primarily for his own pleasure. This financial independence allowed him a certain nonchalance; he painted with a freedom and lack of commercial pressure that many of his contemporaries envied. While critics of the time noted that with more "perseverance" he might have occupied a seat among the titans of French art, his extant works reveal a level of talent that easily rivals the great masters of the Salon.
Exhibiting at the Paris Salon from 1863, Dauvergne’s work remains rare on the market. Our work by the artist, measuring 19x 11 cm, is signed at the lower right and presented in its magnificent original 19th-century gilded frame. The overall framed size is 37 x 29 cm
Skippings Fine Arts has dated this French Impressionist Nude Painting to the 1880s.
Modern french & continental pictures selected by a former french auction house expert
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The bather and the artist, ca 1885, a bashful nude by Manet student French oil on panel
