Details
FERNAND KHNOPFF (BELGIAN, 1858-1921)
La venue de l'aube à Fosset
signed 'FERNAND KHNOPFF' (lower right)
oil on canvas
1258 x 1534 in. (32 x 40 cm.)
Painted circa 1882.
Provenance
Jules Dujardin, Brussels.
Madame Giroux, Brussels.
Marcel Meulemans, Elewijt, by 1987.
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 17 November 1995, lot 100.
Purchased from the above, thence by descent to the present owner.
Literature
R.L. Delevoy, C. de Croës and G. Ollinger-Zinque, Fernand Khnopff, Brussels, 1987, pp. 411-412, no. 48bis (illustrated)
M. Draguet, Khnopff ou l'ambigu poétique, Brussels, 1995, p.33, no. 29 (illustrated).
Exhibited
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Fernand Khnopff et ses rapports avec la Seccession Viennoise, 2 Oct.-6 Dec. 1987, no. 20.
Tokyo, Bunkumura Museum, Himeji, Minicipal Museum of Art, Nagoya, City Art Museum and Yamanashi, Museum of Art, Fernand Khnopff, 8 June-11 Nov. 1990.
Special notice
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Lot Essay

Throughout his career, Khnopff created a series of small 'silent landscapes of heather and woods, stretching on long hills' (letter to Paul Schultze, Naumburg, 1899) at Fosset, a village in the Belgian Ardennes, near Marche, where his family had a summer home.

In these works, Khnopff differentiated himself from the then fashionable taste of human presence in any painted form, with all the formality of light and colour. The one exception he made in this series of 'silent landscapes' is in A Fosset, Un Soir of 1886, where two figures are seen, yet only from behind (see R. L. Delevoy, et alia, op. cit., no. 91).

In the 1904 monograph on Khnopff Louis Dumont-Wilden writes 'De même ces paysages d'Ardennes, ses études faites à Fosset, rien ne ressemble moins aux improvisations lyriques ou aux consciencieuses évocations de nature où se complaisent la plupart des paysagistes belges. Ce que Khnopff a cherché dans le site ardennais, c'est le repos assourdi que représente pour lui la gamme des verts, c'est l'harmonie tendre ou desséchée de ces lignes de coteaux, qui s'étendent jusqu'aux plus lointains horizons la succession de leurs plans bleutés.'

Whereas his countryman and contemporary Felician Rops used the landscape merely as an 'aide memoire', Khnopff felt that nature presents the idea. The basis of all Khnopffian work lies in the belief of superiority of the spiritual over that of the material.

We are grateful to Mrs Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque for confirming the authenticity of the present lot.

Further works from the David Rowse Collection will be sold online in Five Private Collections, running 5th-19th July.

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