Salgueiros no Sol Poente (Saules au Soleil Couchant) - Claude Monet

 

Salgueiros no Sol Poente (Saules au Soleil Couchant) - Claude Monet
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OST - 73x92 - 1889


Characterized by a sublime candescence, Claude Monet’s Saules au soleil couchant radiates with the soft hues of spring and exudes a sense of warmth and shimmering light. The directional brushwork and variegated palette lend an ethereal quality for which the artist is best remembered.
Painted in 1889, this luminous canvas captures a small grove of willows overlooking the hills of Port-Villez, just south of Giverny. In 1883, Monet moved to Giverny where he rented a property called Le Presoir. Located about 20 kilometers from his previous home in Vétheuil, this site would become his permanent home, its grounds later proving to be one of the artist’s greatest inspirations and among the most iconic subjects in art history. Before his gardens at Giverny would fully captivate the artist’s attention at the turn of the century, the idyllic expanses along the Seine and Epte rivers served as the centerpiece of his canvases.
The present work and its pendant (W.1241) feature the same copse at right, the paintings distinguished from one another primarily by the length of shadows cast at varying times of day. Rendered in dulcet tones of yellow and rose, the ground, hills and sky meet in striated effusions of color evoking the later works of Mark Rothko.
Around the same time that Saules au soleil couchant was completed, Monet embarked upon one of his most awe-inspiring series of his career, the inimitable Meules. Like the willows which followed, these humble grainstacks were elevated to the level of the divine under Monet’s brush as the forms burst forth in lambent splendor. These serial paintings, first explored in earnest a few years prior, centralized around the idyllic settings near Giverny. After moving further from Paris, Monet divorced himself from painting urban scenes and the banlieue and instead devoted his work to the beloved countryside and its glades of willows and poplars and fields of wheat.
During the second half of the 1880s, Monet’s work was neatly divided between sojourns abroad and his paintings of Giverny. As Claire Joyes writes, “The landscape at Giverny fascinated him. He spent a long while exploring, walking over hills and through valleys, in marshes and meadows, among streams and poplars. Or, drifting down the quiet river in his boat he would watch with a hunter’s concentration for the precise moment when light shimmered on grass or on silver willow leaves or on the surface of the water. Suddenly or by degrees his motif would be revealed to him”.
The period when the present work was created was one of relatively low production for the artist, making Saules au soleil couchant all the more impressive for its accomplishments. Monet’s fervent support for the work of his late friend Édouard Manet took up much of his time and energy during this period. Monet was campaigning to purchase Manet’s scandalous masterpiece Olympia for the French National Museums, thereby preventing its acquisition by an American buyer whose offer of 20,000 francs had tempted Manet’s widow. The artist worked tirelessly to enlist dozens of his fellow artists, dealers and collectors to come together as ‘subscribers’ to raise the funds. Once secured, Monet lobbied for its inclusion in the collection of the Louvre. However, the museum’s rules barred inclusion of works by artists less than ten years passed, and the painting instead went to the Musée du Luxembourg, then Paris’ museum for contemporary art.
The present work has a long and storied provenance. In December 1921, the Japanese businessman and son of a Prime Minister Kōjirō Matsukata acquired Saules au soleil couchant. Matsukata began collecting artwork in London during World War I with a strong emphasis on Western paintings among other genres. Purported to have acquired 10,000 artworks in his lifetime, the shipping magnate aimed to build a museum of European artworks for the Japanese public. In the course of his collecting, Matsukata became friends with Monet and is believed to have purchased more than 30 works by the artist, lending at least 24 of them (the present work included) to the 1924 Georges Petit exhibition in Paris.
By 1927, however, Matsukata’s vision for a museum was derailed. The Shōwa Financial Crisis forced the closure of banks across the country and ultimately led to Matsukata’s resignation from his business and forced sale of his property. Many of the artworks which has been imported to Japan were confiscated by the Jugo Bank and sold in a series of auctions, while those stored in Europe (in order to avoid the 100% import taxes) faced even worse fates. A large, though unconfirmed, number of works stored in London were destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1939. Approximately 400 artworks were left under the care of Léonce Bénédite, director of the Musée du Luxembourg, who had the pieces housed in the Musée Rodin. However, at the end of World War II, these treasures were sequestered by the French government as ‘enemy property.’ Years later in 1959, the majority of the works were returned to the Japanese government, forming the bulk of the present-day Matsukata Collection, the core of the National Museum of Western Art’s collection in Tokyo.
Among the works sold prior to 1959, Saules au soleil couchant has since made its way through various European and Japanese collections. The magnificent landscape comes to auction for the first time in nearly 20 years.