The only biographical account of Le Sidaner is to be found in one of M. Gabriel Mourey’s penetrating articles in the “Studio.” Le Sidaner was the son of fisherfolk from St. Malo and the Ile Bréhat. He was born in 1862, and spent the first ten years of his life in his native place, the Ile Maurice. “While quite young,” says the writer of the preface to the catalogue of an exhibition held in 1897, “he came to live in Dunkirk, beside the murmuring North Sea, with its melancholy mists. The shock he felt at the change made him absolutely pensive. It was as though, half alarmed, he was taking refuge within himself the better to express the flame of Creole tenderness which burned within him.” His father, who practised painting and sculpture as an amateur, gave the boy every encouragement. At fifteen he was taken away from school, and sent to the local École des Beaux-Arts. Here he studied under a master who was slave to the doctrines of the Antwerp school.
The artist, when telling his early experiences, deplored these evil influences. He admits that they were not worse than those forced upon him in Paris, where, at the École des Beaux-Arts, he studied under Cabanel. Five years he spent under that master, making sketches of the animals at the Jardin des Plantes, and copying Delacroix and Jordaens at the Louvre. Then he passed under the influence of Impressionism. He says: “It was in this year (1881) that Manet displayed his portraits of Pertuiset, le tueur de lions, and of Rochefort. The first of these pleased me infinitely, but the second gradually filled me with alarm; it was so different from that which I had hitherto seen. Nevertheless, I remember well that the famous Bar des Folies-Bergère by this same Manet made the profoundest impression on me. Yet the rules of the school forbade me to consider all this as beautiful as I could have wished to consider it. When I look back on those days it really seems as though I was poisoned. Etaples, that is to say Nature, revived me, and drove the drug from my system.”
APPLE GATHERING · EMILE CLAUS
Le Sidaner goes on to tell how by chance he spent a holiday at Etaples in 1881. He settled there, and remained in the little coast town from 1884 to 1893, where he made friendships with Eugène Vail, Thaulow, Henri Duhem, Alexander Harrison, and others. He refers to a visit to Holland, where Rembrandt, Peter de Hoogh, and Vermeer enchanted him. Having gained a third medal at the Salon des Champs-Élysées he was able to travel to Italy. “Italy simply turned my head, particularly Florence. Oh! the delicious hours I spent in the Convent of San Marco copying the face of the Virgin in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. How much I preferred the simple grace of Fra Angelico and Giotto to the cleverness and skill of Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto.” It was hardly necessary to have avowed these influences, they are so evident in the work of Le Sidaner.
A SUNLIT HOUSE · EMILE CLAUS
He is a man who avoids crowds and the distracting clamour of humanity, loving to work in such dead cities as Bruges, or the peaceful countryside in the neighbourhood of Beauvais. No modern artist has better expressed on canvas the words of the great Millet. “When you paint a picture, whether the subject be a house, a plain, the ocean, or the sky, remember always the presence of man. Think how his joys and sorrows have been intermixed in these landscapes. An inner voice speaks of his inquietude and turmoils. Humanity’s whole existence is conjured up. In painting a landscape think of man.”
Le Sidaner has many affinities to Pointelin, Carrière, and Whistler. They each have sought harmonies of line and colour, and though distinct in personality and unlike in methods, they have produced wonderfully similar effects. One of the most impressive of Le Sidaner’s works is La Table in the Luxembourg. Here is the unmistakable Impressionist technique. In the courtyard of a country house is spread a table, white with napery, upon which stands a glowing opalescent lamp. A calm summer moon diffuses a gentle light over the whole scene. No human figures disturb the peaceful atmosphere, yet the sentiment of their presence pervades the place. The painting is a little masterpiece of its kind. The first canvas exhibited at the Champs-Élysées in 1887 was entitled After Church. Since that time he has exhibited year after year, the subjects of his pictures being well explained by their French titles: La Promenade des Orphelines, Communion in Extremis, Benediction de la Mer (1891), Jeune fille Hollandaise (1892), L’autel des Orphelines (1893), Départ de Tobie (1894), Les Promis, and Les Vieilles (1895). In 1900 he exhibited a notable collection of pictures of Bruges.
Le Sidaner paints a world of dreams. No better description of his work can be found than in the words of Moore: