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HENRI DUHEM French 1860-1941 Oil on Panel

Currency:USD Category:Antiques Start Price:400.00 USD Estimated At:5,000.00 - 8,000.00 USD
HENRI DUHEM French 1860-1941 Oil on Panel
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Oil on panel. Featuring a landscape scene. Signed and attr. Henri Duhem (French, 1860-1941) on the lower left corner. 9.7 x 13 cm (3.8 x 5.1 in). He was descended from an old Flemish family and originally practiced as a lawyer. In 1887, his passion for drawing and watercolors finally led him to go to Paris and enroll in the drawing classes of Henri Harpignies. While there, he became friends with Émile Breton, who introduced him to oil painting. Breton's niece, Virginie Demont-Breton (the daughter of Jules Breton), introduced him to a young painter named Marie Sergeant, whom he married in 1890. At about that time, Demont-Breton moved to a small village named Wissant. Encouraged to follow, the Duhems established a home in Camiers and gathered their artist friends together to form what would be known as the "École de Wissant", some of the most notable members of which were Georges Maroniez, Francis Tattegrain and Fernand Stiévenart.[2] In 1893, he fully abandoned his legal career to devote himself to art, both as a creator and an avid collector of work by his contemporaries. He and his wife travelled extensively as he began to exhibit more widely abroad.Henri Duhem's body of work was decisively influenced by Impressionism and, in particular, by its technique of touche divisée, which he applied to some effect in his rendering of watercourses, watermills and landscapes in the snow, chiefly in the region of Douai and in Flanders. He shared the Impressionist preoccupation with changing light effects at various times of the day. During the early part of World War I, he and Marie lost their only son Rémy at the assault on Les Éparges (20 June 1915). Marie was deeply affected and never truly recovered. She died of a neglected tumor in 1918, during the occupation. Because of his legal experience, Duhem was called upon to assist with the administration of Douai. His painful memories of this period are recorded in a book called La Mort du foyer (The Death of a Home, Éditions Figuière, 1922). In the inter-war period, he remained artistically active, preparing a major show at the Salon des Tuileries in 1923, commuting between Douai and Paris, where he maintained a home in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. In 1932, he was named a Commander in the Légion d'honneur. Five years later, faced with declining health and the threat of war, he moved to Juan-les-Pins, where he lived at the villa "Mont Riant" until his death. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris and received an honourable mention at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. He was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. PROVENANCE: Southern Ontario estate