STILL LIFE WITH HOLLYHOCKS, CORNFLOWERS, POPPIES, WILLOWS AND BUTTERFLIES AT THE EDGE OF A WOOD
signed and dated Leon Bonvin 1865 lower left
watercolour and gouache with gum arabic on paper
26.5 x 20cm; 10 1/2 x 7 3/4in
35 x 28.5cm; 13 3/4 x 11 1/2in (framed)

Property from a Private Collection, North London

Provenance
Clive Lloyd (1920-2004), Gomshall Gallery, Godalming, Surrey
Purchased from the above by the present owner circa 1969

The present work is registered in the Bonvin catalogue raisonné and archive maintained by Maud Guichané.

Painted in the village of Vaugirard, just beyond the Paris city limits, the present re-discovered watercolour is among the last works Léon Bonvin completed. After his marriage to Constance Gaudon in 1861 and running the family inn, Léon's financial situation had worsened. In early 1866 he travelled into the city to try to sell his recent work but with no success. In despair the artist hanged himself in the forest of Meudon on 31^st January. He was thirty-one years old.

Bonvin left behind him his wife bereft, three young children and a small but utterly exquisite body of works on paper. For many years, other than at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore which holds half of Bonvin’s known output, his work has remained widely overlooked. All that changed however, in the recent revelatory exhibition devoted to the artist at the Fondation Custodia, Paris in 2022.

The exhibition, curated by the late Ger Luitjen and Gabriel Weisberg, featured some fifty-seven works – half of Bonvin’s entire recorded output - with loans from institutions and collectors around the world. The comprehensive catalogue includes a catalogue raisonné assembled by Maud Guichané fully documenting all the 116 known works by the artist. The majority are in museum collections, mostly in France and the USA. Ten early works are in the Louvre, Paris, while fifty-seven are in the Walters Art Museum. The reappearance of the present work, one of only twenty that Bonvin executed in the year leading up to his death, and described by Weisberg as ‘a great example’, thus marks an exciting addition to the artist’s known oeuvre.

The youngest of nine children from his father’s second wife, Bonvin grew up in the family inn in Vaugirard known as the 'Bonvin de Bourgogne'. A destination for Paris’s artists, actors and writers as well as the local workers, it was set amidst fields and open plains. Although naturally shy, Léon contributed to the in-house entertainment by playing music on his reed-organ. After his father’s death in 1862 he took on the role of inn-keeper and wine merchant.

Meanwhile, his half-brother François Bonvin, seventeen years his senior, encouraged him in his artistic development. For a while Léon attended classes at the Ecole Bachelier, Paris now the Ecole Nationale Supèrieure des Art Décoratifs. Weisberg suggests he may have come across Henri Fantin-Latour and Théodule Ribot, either direct or through his half-brother (Fondation Custodia, Léon Bonvin, Drawn to the Everyday, exh. cat., Paris, 2022, p. 22). There too he would have been exposed to the renewal of interest in still-life painting, in particular the work of Jean Simeon Chardin (1699-1779), who was such a strong influence on the Realist painters of the day.

The rustic interior and atmospheric surroundings of the Bonvin de Bourgogne are recorded in Léon's exceptionally refined early black and white drawings, photographic in their quiet stillness. Outside Léon drew directly from nature, recording the flowers in the fields near his home with the eye of a botanist. By the 1860s, he had turned exclusively to watercolour, oil paint being too expensive, and from 1863 began working outdoors, recording flowers in their natural habitat as if living still-lifes, as evident in the present example.

Always small and intimate in scale, Léon’s works convey ‘a sense of monumentality that belies the size of the paper on which he painted' (Gabriel Weisberg, The Drawings and Watercolours of Leon Bonvin, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980, p. 62). In the present work he captures with forensic detail the plants, summer flowers and insects. The willow tree and surrounding undergrowth overshadow the small figure bent down working in the field in the background. It is the natural world which is centre stage, not man.

Despite his slim output and his lack of commercial success, by the time of his tragic end, Léon's work was held in high regard. Among those who appreciated his extraordinary talent was the Baltimore collector William T. Walters, who started acquiring Bonvin's work in quantity via the Paris agent George A. Lucas in the early 1860s. Following Leon's death François Bonvin organised a posthumous sale to support Constance and her young family. The list of contributors to the sale at Drouot in May 1866 is an extraordinary who’s who of 1860s realist painting and printmaking. Those who gave work to the sale included Félix Bracquemond, Jules Breton, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Jules Laurens, Ernest Meissonier, Claude Monet, Felix Nadar, Théodule Ribot, Antoine Vollon, Henri Fantin-Latour and François himself. In all there were eighty-eight contributors, testament indeed to an important and much-admired fellow artist; a deeply sensitive and hugely talented Van Gogh-like figure in the age of Realism.