Marlborough Gallery, New York (acquired by 1957)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in April 1968

London, Marlborough Fine Art, XIXth & XXth Century European Masters, 1957

Geneviève Claisse, Herbin, Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Paris, 1993, no. 172, illustrated p. 309

The canvas is not lined. There is a 3 by 0.5cm. repaired tear with associated retouching to the green area behind the tree trunk and a 5 by 1.5cm. repaired tear with associated retouching towards the lower right corner. There is a 14 by 1cm. vertical line of retouching towards the left edge and some further small spots of retouching, mainly towards the edges. All retouching is visible under UV light. Apart from two tiny nicks of paint loss above the red tree to the pink area of the sky, this work is in good condition.
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Paint🍬ed in 1908 at the highpoint of the Fauvist movement, the present work is a remarkable demonstration of Auguste Herbin's uninhibited talents as a colourist painter. The bold rivulets of solid, unmodulated colour articulate a composition that is simultaneously defined by Modernist flatness and a vertiginous sense of perspective; in the lower foreground, the undisturbed surface of a stream quietly reflects the suffused light of the sky above, dividing the intense green planes on either side. Above, a row of trees dance along the horizon line, their canopies illuminated with prismatic colours, shielding the lush fields from a scorching sun. The present work is a dazzling mosaic of colour, posing a sharp contrast to the relatively sober, restrained scenes of Lille and Paris which Herbin executed in the first few years of the century.

It was between 1906 and 1907 that Herbin completely embraced Fauvism. In March 1907 he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants alongside Derain, Vlaminck and Braque, and in October of that year Herbin exhibited additional Fauve works at the fifth Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais. During the years before World War I, Herbin won recognition in Germany, and the influence of German Expressionism at this time is evident in the pres𒈔ent work. Herbin's works could also be seen in the Secession and 🥃Die Brücke, in the Galerie der Sturm, in the Sonderbund exposition in Cologne and in the Galerie Flechtheim in Frankfurt. His northern-French use of colours and flatness of the surface began to move closer to the works of painters like Schmidt-Rotluff, Pechstein and Heckel than to his French Fauve colleagues.

In the words of Serge Lemoine, former director of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, speaking of Herbin's L'Église à Orgerus, 1908 (fig. 1), 'this painting could well be directly linked to the works of certain painters of the Blaue Reiter, in particular to Kandinsky (Grüngasse in Murnau, 1909, Städtische Galerie), to Jawlensky (Einsamkeit, 1912, Dortmund, Museum am Ostwalt), to Gabrielle Münter (Landschaft mit weisser Mauer, 1910, Hagen, Karl-Ernst Osthaus Museum)' (G. Claisse, Op. Cit. foreword by Serge Lemoine, p. 11).

FIG. 1, Auguste Herbin, L'Église à Orgerus, 1908, Galerie Neupert, Zürich