Additional Images

Provenance:

Private collection, London, UK

Note:

Henri Beau is far too little known in English Canada. Born in Montreal in 1863, he left Canada for France in 1888, where he developed and maintained a career until his death in 1949. He exhibited less in Canada than in France, where he often showed with the Société des artistes indépendants. Fortunately for Beau and the study of Canadian art, recent scholarship on Canadian Impressionism by A. K. Prakash and by the National Gallery of Canada for its internationally touring exhibition, Canada and Impressionism: New Horizons, 1880-1930, has helped rewrite Beau into the history of Canadian art.

Probably painted in the middle 1920s in Normandy, most likely around Rouen or downriver near the mouth of the Seine at Honfleur, Untitled is a beautiful Impressionist painting redolent of the twentieth-century paintings of Claude Monet. Monet’s vaporous blue and mauve-infused views of London and Venice, and late yellow and green views of his garden at Giverny, are here sensitively coalesced by Beau.

Fresh to the market, the painting’s provenance is nearly as compelling as the artwork itself. Acquired at a thrift shop in London, England in 2017, the painting plausibly belonged to the actor John Vere Biggar (1915-1961) whose father, Henry Percival Biggar (1872-1938), was the chief Archivist for the Public Archives of Canada and worked with Beau in France. Untitled is in an extraordinary state of preservation. Unvarnished and unlined, it has the unique texture and original freshness Impressionist masters like Monet and Claude Pissarro wanted for their paintings, which too often were sullied by varnish after they left their studios.