Henri Rivière (painter)

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Henri Rivière, 1935
Japanese silk embroidery from the Henri Rivière collection

Henri Rivière (born March 11, 1864 in Paris , † August 24, 1951 in Sucy-en-Brie ) was a French director and set designer for shadow theater, as well as graphic artist and painter. Mainly woodcuts and watercolors , but also illustrations , lithographs and etchings have survived .

Youth and education

Rivière was born as the son of the haberdashery Prosper Rivière and the musician Henriette ("Lou"), who came from a middle-class family. He grew up on Montmartre with his brother Jules . At the beginning of the siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1870, the family fled to Ax-les-Thermes , the father's region of origin. After returning to Paris in 1873, his father died at the age of 43 and the family was forced to move for financial reasons. Paul Signac was one of Rivière's new neighbors, with whom he befriended. In 1875, his mother remarried, which involved moving and changing schools. His status as an external student allowed him to continue walking on Montmartre and visiting Signac. After completing his regular school days, his mother sent him to a business school, which he had to drop out of due to insufficient performance. The young Henri worked briefly for an importer of ostrich feathers before he was tutored in 1880 by an acquaintance of his stepfather, the portrait and history painter Émile Bin . However, he died a year and a half later, so that his friend Signac took over the training.

Creative period

In 1882 he met Rodolphe Salis , the operator of the artist establishment Le Chat Noir , who hired him as editor of his weekly house newspaper of the same name. For this he regularly produced poems, various articles and, above all, illustrations. But he also continued to pursue his own artistic work. Initially influenced by Gustave Doré , he made his first attempts at etchings, but soon discovered his talent for woodcuts. In 1886 he was also appointed artistic director of Le Chat Noir. With a small inheritance that he received in 1884, he went on vacation with his brother to Brittany , to the small town of Saint-Briac-sur-Mer . This was also the beginning of his passion for the area.

With innovative ideas he produced colored shadow theaters from 1888 , e.g. B. for the performance The Temptation of Saint Anthony . He painted the glass support plates of a magic lantern as a background for the shadow theater with colored representations. The play figures made of zinc foil were moved below the visible stage and a lamp shining diagonally from below cast the shadow play onto the projection surface. He was in charge of the productions and stage design until the theater was closed in 1897. In addition to the temptation of Antonius , he designed La Marche à l'étoile (The Star March ), a mystery in ten pictures and based on the poems and music of George's question roll The Lost Son and the Sainte-Geneviève . By the time the Chat Noir closed, 46 productions had been performed by him.

Also in 1888 he met his future wife Eugénie Ley , who moved in with him a year later. The marriage did not take place until 1895 and they moved into an apartment on Boulevard Clichy. That year he also bought his house in Loguivy-de-la-Mer , which is now part of the municipality of Ploubazlanec , and from then on he spent the winters in Paris and the summers in Brittany. Many of his typical motifs were created there.

The year 1897 marked a major change in his work. The Chat Noir was already closed when Rivière made the acquaintance of Florine Langweil , a proven connoisseur of Japanese art. At the time, Japonism was popular in France. Animated by the pieces he found in Madame Langeweil's antique shop, he began to be interested in Japanese woodcut art. In 1905, Tadamasa Hayashi , a Japanese art dealer who imported Japanese woodblock prints to France, acquired four paintings by Rivière as wall decorations for his wall decoration in addition to some works by Edgar Degas , with whom he had been friends since 1898 and works by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot House. In 1911 Rivière became a member of the Le Cénacle association around Degas, which he later became chairman of. A year later his brother committed suicide, which is why he took in his young nephew, who later became a museologist , Georges-Henri Rivière . Out of solidarity, he then took the middle name Henri .

After Rivière sold his house in Brittany, he and his wife went on a trip to Italy in 1912 at the invitation of André Noufflard , Florine Langweil's son-in-law. He visited Tuscany and Umbria. He had stays in the cities of San Gimignano, Siena, Monte Oliveto, Orvieto and Assisi. After that, no further Japanese motifs are known of him. Instead, in 1913 he published the book La céramique dans l'art musulman with one hundred color illustrations of ceramics of Islamic art. In 1917 he broke away from printmaking and turned entirely to watercolor, to which he had been devoting himself since 1890. This was interrupted by a job at the Demotte publishing house from 1920 to 1923. Rivière's exhibition in 1921 at the Musée des Arts décoratifs was also the time when he retired from his active career as an artist.

Late years

He now spent the summers in Provence and devoted himself entirely to his wife and their friends. But even in retirement, he never stopped creating drawings and watercolors. At the beginning of the seat war on September 3, 1943, he was reminded of the year of his childhood escape, 1870, and moved with his wife to Buis-les-Baronnies . A little later his wife died after a short illness. This plunged him into a deep depression, so that Noufflard invited him to his estate in the Dordogne . There he slowly recovered and began to paint again. At the age of 80, he found that his dwindling eyesight made it impossible for him to carry out his work with the precision he was used to. When the war was over, he returned to his apartment on Boulevard Clichy for the first time in 1945. There he dictated his memoirs Les Détours du Chemin: Souvenirs, notes et croquis 1864-1947 , now completely blind . In 1950 he became seriously ill and died the following year in Sucy en Brie . According to his wishes, he is buried at the side of his wife in Fresnay-le-Long on the property of the Noufflard family.

Rivière left behind an extensive work with more than 1000 watercolors, many hundreds of illustrations, lithographs, etchings but mainly many woodcuts.

Working methods

Riviere combined classic, modern and decorative styles to create elegant compositions, heavily influenced by Japonism, which was quite popular in France at the time . Although he opposed the overt stylization in art and was turned towards naturalness, his woodcut prints reveal stylistic techniques of Japanese works of art.

Works (selection)

Etching, aquatint and lithograph

Woodcuts using the Japanese method

  • Les Trente-six Vues de la Tour Eiffel (1888–1902), series of manufactured boards plates and lithographs in five tones, his first plate depicting the construction of the Eiffel Tower;
  • La Mer: études de vagues (1890–1892), strong Japanese influence, borrowed from Hokusai , Utagawa Hiroshige . Series of 20 works;
  • Paysages bretons (1890–1894), series of 20 works;

Shadow theater at Chat Noir

  • La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, magical spectacle in two acts and 40 panels , music by Fragerolle and Albert Tinchant, premiere on December 28, 1887.
  • Phryne and Scènes grecques (Greek scenes) 1888, to the music of Charles de Sivry .
  • La Marche à l'étoile, Mystery in 10 panels , text and music by Georges Fragerolle , 1893.
  • L'Enfant prodigue, biblical scenes on 7 panels , text and music by Georges Fragerolle, 1895.
  • Sainte-Geneviève , text and music by Claudius Blanc and Léopold Dauphin.
  • Le Juif-errant, légende en 8 tableaux , music by Georges Fragerolle.
  • Clairs de lune, féerie en 6 tableaux , text and music by Georges Fragerolle.

Lithographs

This method enabled him to enlarge his formats from 1897 onwards.

  • Aspects de la nature (1897–1899) published in March 2014 in the children's editions by Larousse publisher;
  • Paysages parisiens (1900);
  • Féerie des heures (1901–1902);
  • Beaux pays de Bretagne (1914).

Publications illustrated by Henri Rivière

  • A. Melandri: Les Farfadets. Conte breton , illustrations by Henri Rivière, Maison Quantin , 1886
  • La Tentation de Saint-Antoine: fairy tale play , first performed in Le Chat noir on December 28, 1887, music by Fragerolle and Albert Tinchant, premiere on December 28, 1887, Paris, Plon, 1887
  • Le pardon de Sainte-Anne-la-Palud , 1892 or 1893, Quimper, Museum of the Department of Breton
  • Sainte Geneviève , text and music by Claudius Blanc and Léopold Dauphin, graphic design by Henri Rivière, 1893
  • La Marche à l'Étoile Text and music by Georges Fragerolle, graphic design by Henri Rivière, Flammarion, 1899, re-edited in 1902
  • La Céramique dans l'art musulman. Collection of one hundred color plates , Paris, E. Lévy, 1913.
  • La Céramique dans l'art d'Extrême-Orient , Paris, Albert Lévy, 1923.

Publications after his death

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • Memoirs: Les Détours du Chemin: Souvenirs, notes et croquis 1864-1951 , Saint-Remy-de-Provence: Equinoxe, 2004, ISBN 2841354334
  • Biography: Henri Rivière , Armond Fields, GM Smith / Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1983

Web links

Commons : Henri Rivière (painter)  - Collection of pictures

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.bnf.fr/documents/icono_riviere.pdf "Iconography Henri Rivière between Impressionism and Japonism" from: French National Library. (PDF, 488 kB)
  2. ↑ http://unpointculture.com/2014/12/24/les-36-vues-de-la-tour-eiffel/ Unpointculture.com
  3. ↑ NRP Collège, NRP Collège: The skills to read and write poetry (French)
  4. ^ Pierre Bonnard, The Graphic Art
  5. ^ Comité national de la gravure française, Nouvelles de l'estampe , issues 223 to 228, 2009
  6. ↑ Artpric.com, entrance to the port of Ploumanac'h (Le beaux pays de Bretagne, plate 17)
  7. ↑ at Gallica ( Memento from October 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ available at Gallica .
  9. ↑ available at Gallica .
  10. ↑ see also online on the anti-museum website .
  11. ↑ Le Journal, page 6 , accessed on April 27, 2016
  12. ^ La Revue des Beaux-Arts, page 2 , accessed on April 27, 2016
  13. ↑ Exhibition at the Musée d´Orsay, 1988 ( Memento des Originals from April 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed May 4, 2016 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.musee-orsay.fr
  14. ^ Exhibition in the Folkwangmuseum, 2010 , accessed on May 4, 2016
  15. ^ Exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, 2015 , accessed on May 4, 2016
  16. ^ Memoirs at Worldcat, accessed May 8, 2016
  17. ↑ Biography at Worldcat, accessed May 8, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Rivière, Henri
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French artist and designer
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 1951
Place of death Sucy-en-Brie