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Dimensions: 55 by 46cm., 21 1/2 by 18in.
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Provenance: Acquired directly from the Artist by Mr and Mrs Lloyd Osbourne, probably 1923
Mrs Reubie Barsky, inherited from Mrs Osbourne, and thence to the present owners
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Exhibited: New York, Clausen Art Rooms, details untraced.
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Notes: It is very rare that paintings dating from Matthew Smith's early years in France come on to the market. Of those that he did produce at this time, the majority are small panel studies. In comparison, the present work is unusually large and accomplished and can be regarded as an exceptional early achievement. In the years immediately preceding the First World War, spent largely in Brittany and Paris, Smith was acutely concerned with establishing his artistic identity. Very occasionally, as in the case of the present work, he would sign his name in full (see also, for example, Lilies, 1913-4, coll. Leeds City Art Gallery). The addition of a signature on this very early landscape would therefore indicate that the artist himself valued it very highly.
Barn with Trees, Varengeville (a companion piece to Varengeville, Près Dieppe currently on loan to the Central Museum, Northampton) was painted during a summer outing to the coast near Dieppe in 1911. Smith had already been living in Paris for almost two years. The previous year he and his friend John Lyman had attended the Atelier Matisse. Although Smith probably only met Matisse on two or three occasions, he held him in the highest possible esteem, a level of veneration that Alice Keene descibes as bordering on "religious awe" (The Two Mr Smiths: The Life and Work of Matthew Smith, Lund Humphries, London, 1995, p.31). Some years later Smith wrote that his relationship with Matisse "was such as one might wish to have or conceive as possible with some other being in a future world... A dream relationship undisturbed by personal contact which perhaps would only embarrass or destroy a communion of spirit wholly imagined so wholly indestructible" (ibid., p.32).
While Barn with Trees, Varengeville was almost certainly painted 'en plein air' and shows the influence of the Impressionists' broken brushwork, it is clearly from the Fauves that he had learnt the use of such striking non-naturalistic colour. In addition to Smith's direct contact with Matisse, he would have had unlimited opportunities to view the most important Fauvist and Post-Impressionist works. His Saturday nights in Paris were frequently spent at soirées held at the home of Gertrude and Leo Stein whose collection included many of the best works to have been painted by Matisse between 1905 and 1907 (it was the 1905 Salon d'Automne that first gave rise to the derisive 'Fauve' moniker). In addition, as Alice Keene points out, at Galerie Bernheim Jeune between 1910 and 1912, Smith could have seen work by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Bonnard, Vuillard and Van Dongen.
Thus by 1911, Matthew Smith's knowledge of Post-Impressionist and particularly Fauvist painting would have been far in advance of his English peers. Painted before Roger Fry's second Post-Impressionist exhibition had even taken place in London, Barn with Trees, Varengeville demonstrates the degree to which Matthew Smith had assimilated not just the theory but also the practice of using colour and form above subject matter as the primary means of artistic expression. As Keene has remarked, Smith not only admired Matisse but shared a very similar temperament. The readiness with which he absorbed the French master's lessons may perhaps be put down as much to intuition as conscious willingness. What is certain is that the years he spent in France provided far more than the mere foundations of his identity as a great colourist, an identity that he shared with no other English artist of his generation.
The following summer, Matthew Smith and his new wife, Gwen, moved to Grez-sur-Loing near Fontainebleu for a period of at least twelve months. It was here that he met his first real patrons - Alden Brookes and Lloyd Osbourne, stepson of Robert Louis Stevenson. Osbourne and his wife were to become firm friends of the artist and, according to the Vera Cuningham notebook, had by 1927 purchased four of his oil paintings.
Barn With Trees, Varengeville will be included in John Gledhill's forthcoming catalogue raisonne of Sir Matthew Smith's paintings. We are extremely grateful to John Gledhill for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
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