Emile René Ménard (1862-1930), The Bath Of Diane, Preparatory Drawing (orsay), 1920

Émile René Ménard (1862 – 1930)
Le Bain de Diane, circa 1920
Graphite
14,6 x 19 cm
workshop stamp lower right (not in Lugt)

Very good condition
Framed, under glass
Dimensions with frame: 20 x 27 cm

Work to be compared with the pastel from 1920, kept at the Musée d'Orsay, RF 39732: https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/oeuvres/le-bain-de-diane-18121

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A goddess and nymphs in a dream landscape. Nature in perfect harmony with these feminine silhouettes and the appearance, on the right, of the deer watching over the bath of Diane. A small format drawing, framed in a discreet manner, which represents the starting point of the research of composition for this artist who explored this mythological subject on several occasions : the Musée d'Orsay keeps a very beautiful version, in pastel, which allows to grasp the ambition and fame of Emile René Ménard, master of Idealism.

The son of an art historian director of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Émile René Ménard (1862-1930) forged his taste for painting in Barbizon, where he spent his holidays rubbing shoulders, thanks to his father, with painters Corot, Millet, Diaz, Daubigny and Rousseau. This feeling for the landscape as well as his taste for Antiquity guided him in the definition of his immediately recognizable style. In 1880, he entered the Académie Julian where he was a student of Bouguereau, Baudry and Robert-Fleury. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon in 1883.

This mythological subject had everything to charm Émile René Ménard, who instilled echoes with Greek mythology into the symbolist aesthetic that was dear to him. Following Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, Ménard continued to illustrate Greek myths in accordance with the aesthetic evolution of his time. At the same time as him, in the first decades of the 20th century, Nabi Ker-Xavier Roussel also explored ancient mythology, in compositions imbued, as here, with timeless poetry. What Ménard brings new and original to this classic conception of the French landscape is, beyond the anecdote, the search for total unity, in the design, the human forms responding to the trees or water surfaces, like so many elements of the same whole.

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Georges Desvallières, on the subject of Émile René Ménard (quote taken from the catalog of one of the sales of the Ménard workshop, Hôtel Drouot, December 12, 1973):
“How can we summarize Ménard's poetics? I would say passion for nature, passion for beauty and beautiful balance first of all...The love of good taste, of great taste as Gustave Moreau said; a sense of modesty such as to the purity of the Greek nude, his ideal however, Ménard in his figures found a way to add chastity; thus his personality stands out very singularly from his generation.
The very personal discoveries he made in the study of sunsets, of the value of the characters losing themselves or standing out against the sea and the sky, clearly prove that the outdoors fascinated him just like Manet, Monet or the Impressionists. But he wanted to use his discoveries for a task that was close to his heart, he believed in them and wanted to elevate their values by using them to glorify his dear Greece. »