?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
KER-XAVIER ROUSSEL Le Fête Champêtre.
Sanguine chalk on paper. 235x320 mm; 9 1/4x12 1/2 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right recto.
Provenance: Wolseley Fine Arts, London, with the label on the frame back; private collection, New York.
Roussel (1867-1944) studied at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris alongside his friend and fellow artist Édouard Vuillard. In 1888, he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, and soon began frequenting the Académie Julian, Paris, where Maurice Denis and other students formed the group Les Nabis. In 1899, Roussel, Vuillard, and another close artist friend, Pierre Bonnard, traveled to Lake Como, Venice and Milan. Later that year he settled in L'Étang-la-Ville, Yvelines, and the subject-matter of his paintings veered towards rural landscapes. He drew his subject matter from the area around L'Étang-la-Ville and Saint-Tropez, adapting the scenery to Greek mythological episodes depicting women, children, nymphs, centaurs and fauns. He abandoned the small format pictures typical of the Nabis and created large, brightly coloured paintings in a Post Impressionist style. His paintings celebrated the seasons, abundance, drunkenness, lustful behaviour and dance, the latter influenced by none other than Isadora Duncan.
