French School of the Late 19th Century - The Knight's Farewell

French School after 1890
The Knight's Farewell
Oil on canvas
124 x 64 cm

A beautiful painting, romantic and highly decorative, both monumental in its composition and moving in its subject matter, all the more so given its tight framing. The composition is moving, and the subject of the painting—the knight's farewell to his beloved—is depicted against a naturalistic background with its meadow, flowers, woods, river, and beautiful colors. The painter is from the late 19th or early 20th century, and is undoubtedly French, as indicated by the canvas dealer's mark on the back of the stretcher (the Jules Chauvin firm, which operated at 33 rue du Dragon in Paris between 1895 and 1937). The style of our painting is romantic, even picturesque. The knight carries the "Reichsadler", the imperial eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, and the lady a satchel with various signs including bear paw prints. The style is naturalistic and recalls the English painters of the 1890s inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau on religious and medieval themes and very close to nature with their settings of meadows, flowers and woods. The English art historian John Christian spoke of the last English Romantics in connection with these painters of the end of the century, Burne-Jones, Stanley Spencer and John William Waterhouse. We find in our painting the motifs of meadows, flowers, woods and rivers that we often see in Waterhouse. As for the composition, we think in particular of the English painter of Austrian origin Marianne Stokes and her painting "Aucassin and Nicolette" from 1898 (Private collection) which is very close to our painting with the same position of the two figures against each other, the head of the lady leaning on the chest of the knight and the hand of the latter held by him on his heart! The dimensions of these two paintings are also very close (124 x 81 cm).

Ref: 3M0FAQM5ET