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Description: PROPERTY FROM AN AMERICAN PRIVATE COLLECTION

1824-1898
FERVAQUES. JARDIN ET MAISON DE MONSIEUR JACQUETTE

measurements
36 by 59cm.

alternate measurements
14 1/4 by 23 1/4 in.

Painted in Fervaques, Normandy in October 1877.

signed E. Boudin, dated Octobre 1877 and dedicated à nos bons amis de Fervaques (lower right)

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

M & Mme Jacquette, Fervaques (a gift from the artist)
Mlle Réveillé, Paris
Galerie Georges Petit, Paris
Erna Stiebel (Sale: Christie's, New York, 9th November 1994, lot 1)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

LITERATURE

Robert Schmit, Eugène Boudin, Paris, 1973, vol. I, no. 1187, illustrated p. 410

NOTE

The present work was executed during Boudin's stay at Fervaques, a small village in Normandy, with his friends, the Jacquette family. The artist spent most of his life in Normandy, painting numerous beach and port scenes along its coast. In the 1870s and 1880s Boudin made several visits to the inland village of Fervaques, where he would stay with his friends and paint in the seclusion of their house and garden, away from the bustling atmosphere of the French aristocracy's fashionable summer retreats of Deauville and Trouville.

The present work depicts the well-dressed members of the Jacquette family, at leisure in their garden on a warm sunny day. Dr Jacquette is seen on the right, walking down the sunlit path, observing his young daughter and a maid reaching up to pick an apple from the blossoming tree. To the left of them, looking towards the house, is a fashionably dressed lady, presumably Madame Jacquette, holding a parasol. Like Renoir, Boudin was fascinated by elegant society figures and delighted in depicting their leisurely pursuits and their colourful costumes. The present work is a rare and remarkable example in which the backdrop for such a scene is a lush, sun-drenched garden, rather than the sea.

Fervaques. Jardin et maison de Monsieur Jacquette is one of only seven works Boudin executed at Fervaques. Several of these, alongside paintings by Courbet and Lépine, were later donated by the Jacquette family to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen and the Musée d'Alençon.