When Collecting Is a Fine Art

• Share

A young artist named Claude Monet watched dawn break over the harbor of Le Havre one day in 1872. He called his painting of that experience Impression: Sunrise, and in so doing christened another new dawn: Impressionism. He belonged to an evolving artistic movement that rejected straightforward representation and instead refracted a world of luminosity and color. The sea- and skyscapes of Le Havre and the surrounding Normandy region as a whole inspired him. Other light-minded artists — Edgar Degas and Johan Barthold Jongkind among them — were also drawn to the area. Now, thanks to the recent donation of more than 200 works to a local museum, the French port town has an art collection that lives up to its key role in the birth of Impressionism.

This is not the first time that Le Havre, charmlessly rebuilt from the rubble of World War II, has benefited from the gifts of art-savvy citizens. Its Musée Malraux, founded a century ago as the Musée des Beaux Arts and later renamed after André Malraux, the French author and Culture Minister, has built its collection around a series of significant bequests. In 1900, the brother of Eugène Boudin, an early Impressionist who was a major influence on Monet, donated 220 of the artist's works. In 1936, local businessman Charles-Auguste Marande gave the museum artworks that included masterpieces by Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In 1963, the widow of Raoul Dufy contributed some 30 paintings and drawings by the Le Havre-born Fauvist.

But nothing compares with the latest windfall. In December, Hélène Senn-Foulds presented the museum with 71 oils and more than 130 drawings, watercolors and sculptures amassed by her grandfather, Olivier Senn (1864-1959), a wealthy local merchant. The Musée Malraux has put these works, some of them never before exhibited, on display until June 12 in a temporary show entitled "From Courbet to Matisse." After that, the light-sensitive drawings will be taken down, while the paintings will remain on view until September. Then the elegant concrete-and-glass building, which replaced the war-flattened original in 1961, will be closed for a three-month renovation to accommodate its new treasures.

And treasures they are. Monet's The Seine at Vétheuil — the town where the artist and his dying wife Camille sought refuge from expensive Paris — is a marvel of color and composition. As the river bends, Monet silhouettes the surrounding trees in green, blue, mauve and violet, and mirrors the scene exactly in the water. Pissarro is represented by three French scenes. He, too, was always looking for a cheaper place to live. After he reached Eragny, a village west of Paris, a chronic eye infection prevented him from painting outdoors, so he built a large-windowed studio in the middle of his garden — a landscape he would render over and over in different seasons and times of day. His Sunset at Eragny is one of these color-saturated pictures, with the morning light radiating through trees, barely catching the images of two farm women in the foreground.

Landscapes dominate the exhibit, which begins with one by Eugene Delacroix, a painter better known for romantic, historical and religious paintings. His Landscape at Champrosay was painted about 1849. Early 20th century collectors like Senn recognized the role that Delacroix, Gustave Courbet and Camille Jean-Baptiste Corot played in freeing art from traditional academic restrictions — all are represented here.

Senn also appreciated images of pretty women, particularly if they were painted by Renoir or Edgar Degas. In 1907, the businessman-connoisseur exchanged one of his first Renoirs for another: the sublime Portrait of Nini Lopez, the artist's favorite model, who appears in at least 40 of his paintings. Here she is seated demurely, eyes downcast. On the far left of the painting Renoir has added a strip of slightly worked canvas, perhaps with the idea of creating something more ambitious later. In 1908, Senn acquired his first Degas, a pastel of a woman bathing, and continued to collect the artist's work over the next 30 years.