Beschreibung:

Maximilien Luce (French, 1858-1941) "Couillet, Charleroi, Paysage au Bord de La Riviere", 1896 oil on canvas signed and dated lower right, titled on "Maxwell Galleries, San Francisco" label en verso, stretcher with old auction black stencil "KT667" and inscribed "A. Didisheim". Framed. 19-3/8" x 25-1/2", framed 30-7/8" x 37-1/4" Provenance: Sotheby's, London, U.K., July 2, 1969, lot 51; Collection of Naeib Liehin; Sotheby's, New York, New York, May 21, 1982, lot 311; Private collection, Paris, France; Galerie Maxwell, San Francisco, California; Sotheby's, London, U.K., June 29, 1988 , lot 127; Galerie Etienne Sassi, Paris, France; Private collection, Switzerland; Sotheby's, New York, New York, May 8, 2008, lot 195; Shapiro Auctions, New York, New York, September 26, 2015, lot 545. Literature: Philippe Cazeau, Maximilien Luce (Lausanne: La Bibliotheque des Arts, 1982), p. 90; Jean Bouin-Luce and Denise Bazetoux, Maximilien Luce Catalogue Raisonne de L'Oeuvre Peint,, vol. 1 (Paris: JBL, Sous le vent, 1986), no. 1043, illustrated p. 94. Notes: Born into a family of modest means, Luce always had a deep predilection for the working class. After serving in the military for four years, Luce began his artistic career as an engraver, before turning to painting full time in 1883. Influenced by the Impressionists, who advocated plein air studies, Luce took multiple day trips to the outskirts of Paris - painting the changing effects of sunlight on the woodlands and fields through the juxtaposition of colors quickly applied in wet overlapping impastos through rapid short brush strokes. A fine example of this is lot 346, which was painted on the wooded bank of the Chalouette river in Moulineaux, a commune in Ile-de-France, 70 kilometers southwest of Paris. Between 1900 and 1905, Luce painted several sylvan landscapes of the Moulineaux, including "Route de Campagne a Moulineaux" that sold in these rooms on July 17, 2010 as lot 394. In these works, Luce elucidates the depth of the shaded foliage through layered blues and greens offset by warm yellows, beiges and pinks created through the mixture of complementary colors. Though Luce first studied the Impressionists when he began painting, and would later revert back to a tempered Impressionist style that he maintained in various facets throughout his life, some of his most exploratory, political and powerful work was executed in the last decade of the 19th century. In 1887 Luce was introduced to the Neo-Impressionist group by fellow artist Camille Pissarro and quickly adopted the Divisionist technique of color application in separate patches or dots, believing it achieved a greater luminosity in color than Impressionism proper. A 1904 exhibition review in Art et Decoration captures the verisimilitude of Luce's oeuvre: "the immense furnaces that ablaze the night violet; the flames of the street lights and carriages that flicker like stars on the streets; the life and work of the wharfs; London by fog and the Midi engorged by light at midday; these are the spectacles by which Mr. Maximilien Luce is engaged". Few artists at the turn of the century were as versatile in their range of subjects as Luce. He painted sunlit landscapes and the coast of St. Tropez with the same passion and sensitivity that he did factory and mine workers. In the 1890s, Luce made several trips to the mining industry in Belgium, of which Charleroi was the epicenter. The region, called pays noir (black country) for its ashen soil, rich in ore, which bore proletarian toil and soiled the faces and air of Charleroi, fascinated Luce - and he celebrated both the natural beauty of the geography and the brutish conditions it produced. A fine example is this landscape of Couillet, an area in the town of Charleroi. It captures not only the innate splendor of the village, depicted from the verdant banks of the Sambre river with the spire of the 16th-century St. Lawrence church in the distance, but it also portends a more somber rea