Henri Le Sidaner (1862-1939)

Denoted by planar, fragmented brushwork, the colored light in Le Sidaner’s L'horloge de la place Saint Marc seamlessly hops across the canvas under the hazy dusk of day’s end. The stillness and dreamy silence of what Camille Mauclair coined as “Le Sidaner’s time” elicits a sense of dream-like nostalgia and sentimental realism over the dissolving forms.
Often compared to Claude Monet for his portrayal of light through the manipulation of color, Le Sidaner differed from the older generation of Impressionists in that he rarely painted outdoors. He would quickly sketch the scenes he observed as he walked through the town, later crafting the compositions from his imagination. Le Sidaner breached a new realm of symbolist rhetoric through his “musical quality of colour” (I. Mössinger and K. Sagner, Henri Le Sidaner, Chemnitz, 2009, p. 66) and “taste for tender, soft and silent atmospheres” (Y. Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op. cit., p. 31).