FAUVIST SCHOOL
Probably French or Belgian, first half of the 20th Century

A White House on a Tree-Lined Street

Oil on artist's board | unsigned | in early giltwood frame

22 1/8" H x 27 3/4" W [frame]
17 7/8" H x 23 7/8" W [board]

An evocative modernist landscape painted in thick impasto on pressed artist’s board, the painting depicts a tree-lined street leading past the luminous façade of a white house. The unknown artist employs a Fauvist-inspired palette of intense greens, violets, and the most brilliant blues. These contrast against the pale ochres and rose tones to capture the dappled light falling across the street and building while evoking a sense of the sea that is only hinted at in the distance. The handling is vigorous and energetic, the brushwork broken and scattered, the paint heavily worked and reworked with layered passages of color worked wet and intermingling one layer into the next. 

Executed on a standard artist chipboard support, the work is stylistically aligned with painters of the Fauvist and early École de Paris movements in the first half of the twentieth-century.

Condition: Carefully cleaned and sealed in traditional Dammar varnish. Inpaint to perhaps 1-3% of surface: tree to the left of the centermost tree with inpaint in the leaves at the top, speck touch up right of trunk, leftmost tree with single spot of touchup in trunk, minor touchup to extreme edges. Frame is old and loosely of the same period as the painting, this with joint separations, scattered random paint marks and extensive wear. Painting itself is ready to place (frame should likely be replaced depending on the taste and preference of the buyer).

ref. 501EJG02Q