Oil on canvas.
Signed, dated and dedicated upper left: V. Prouvé à l’ami Hekking/ bien cordialement/ 1886.
89 x 104cms. (33 x41in.)
PROVENANCE: A gift from the artist to his friend Louis Hekking; thence by descent.
EXHIBITED: Salon of 1888, no.2082; Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Retrospective Victor Prouvé, May 1947; Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Peinture et Art Nouveau, 1999, cat.10, illus. p.37.
LITERATURE: Exhibition catalogue, Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Victor Prouvé. Les années de l’Ecole de Nancy, 2008, p.64, and note 54, p.124, note.28 (with incorrect measurements)
Prouvé was born in Nancy, a city of textiles and he entered the Design School there before studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and in the studio of Alexander Cabanel. He became a portrait and landscape painter primarily but also a sculptor and he was active in the decorative arts making designs for leather, embroidery and jewelry, for glass and for posters and book covers. In 1900, he became a founding member of the Ecole Art Nouveau with his friends Emile Gallé and Emile Friant and was made head of the movement in 1904. His paintings were exhibited regularly at the Salons in Paris resulting in numerous public and private commissions including the decorations for the staircase of the Issy-les-Moulineaux hotel de ville, a large canvas of a Bacchanale for the famous La Lorraine brasserie and the Croix de Bourgogne monument, both in Nancy. From 1919-1940 Prouvé was the director of the Nancy Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He had a large family and very often worked on projects with the assistance of his wife, Marie.
The violinist Louis Hekking (1854-1938) was a professor at the Nancy Conservatoire de musique; he played in the orchestra of the Nancy opera and with a string quartet who often performed for the salons Nancy society figures. When the critic Emile Hinzelin saw this painting at the Salon of 1888 he commented in the Nancy journal, La Lorraine-Artiste (10 June) ‘This musician artist, in expectation of inspiration, adjusts his bow with his sensitive fingers, entirely accomplished. Nature, the clement benefactress, has granted all his wishes : she has even managed, by unusual caprice, to match his beard and hair to the wood of his instrument”. 1888 was an important year for Prouvé; he had just returned from spending four months in Tunisia when he presented this canvas at the Salon and was emerging from his early academic style with a more liberated and expressive technique. He moved back to Nancy and worked with Gallé on entries for the Universal Exhibition of 1889. Spending time in the generous company of the Republican lawyer Léon Grillon and his wife, he encountered a sophisticated cultural world for which the defence of contemporary art was an important subject.
Notes:
1. La Lorraine-Artiste, no.20, p.73 ‘Cet artiste, attendant la fougue inspiratrice, assurant son archer entre ses doigts nerveus, c’est un être accompli. Clémente bienfaitrice, la nature d’avence a comblé tout ses voeux: elle a mêmeassorti, par un rare caprice, au bois de l’instrument sa barbe et ses cheveux.’
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