Maurice DENIS (Granville, 1870 - Paris, 1943) - Lot 7

Maurice DENIS (Granville, 1870 - Paris, 1943) View of Fiesole, preparatory to The Annunciation with Red Slippers (1898) Pencil and pastel highlights 26 x 49.5 cm Pencil annotations on drawing: "terre", "oeillets", "geranium". Annotations on back: "Vues des collines autour de Florence" and "JB lot n°2". Provenance: Maurice Denis heirs In November 1897, Maurice Denis, his wife Marthe and his daughter Marie, visited Fiesole as guests at the Villa Papiniano in the hills above Florence, rented by their friend, the composer Ernest Chausson. The discovery of this site was enchanting for the painter, and inspired a major composition: L'Annonciation aux chaussons rouges. He placed the Gospel scene on a terrace in front of this landscape, with the convent of San Domenico di Fiesole below, where Fra Angelico lived for twenty years. Our drawing is a study of this infinitely gentle panorama. Beneath its primitive ingenuity lies an "order that already aspires to classicism", as Jean-Paul Bouillon remarks: "that of a carefully squared parterre, whose strict order is underlined by a preparatory drawing (namely ours), with a rigorous linear perspective." (Maurice Denis, Skira 1993, page 85) The painting remains faithful to this lead pencil layout, in which colored pencils specify the landscape elements; but it transfigures the whole in the light of a cameo of pinks and mauves.