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Portrait of Marthe Denis, the Artist’s Wife
Maurice Denis • Painting, 1893, 45×54 cm
Description of the artwork «Portrait of Marthe Denis, the Artist’s Wife»
In 1893, Maurice Denis married Marthe Meurier after a tender, piercing love relationship that lasted three years. They spent their honeymoon in Bretagne where they rented a house in a quiet town on the coast and enjoyed a wonderful time of having just each other. Denis painted many portraits of his wife here, including this one. They contain many recognizable techniques of old fresco painting, as well as modernist pictorial principles preached by Paul Gauguin, and later, the artists of the Nabi Group. Maurice Denis was just one of the Nabis, the young artists who called themselves prophets and turned art into a part of the living space. They painted with bold, bright spots of pure color and attempted to talk about the eternal and unchangeable, to communicate their own personal, and at the same time to listen to the life of nature. And they succeeded, each in his own way.
Marthe Meurier, the wife of Maurice Denis was a pianist, a committed Catholic. For several years, she was the subject of dozens of portraits and the model for Denis’s allegorical paintings. In his personal diary, he kept a lyrical report about his relationship with Marthe recording the shades of his own experiences, new feelings, and the changes in his attitude towards life. This diary would be quoted in long poetic names of lithographic works from the “Love” album, published by Denis six years later. He would call his works ‘Our Souls, In Slow Movement’ or ‘The Twilights Have the Softness of an Old Painting.’ Maurice Denis never ceased to paint Martha since the time of their meeting in 1891 until her death in 1919. He couldn’t get enough of Marthe’s one mood, so he painted ‘Triple Portrait of Marthe’ and the ‘The Muses’, filling the canvases with her image repeated in different moods, looking into her face in the moments of sadness and thoughtfulness, joy and concentration.
In 1895, Denis would compile several lyrical works with Marthe as a subject in a large-scale cycle called “Love and Life of a Woman”. A little later, Denis would repeat these same images in a long frieze on the wall of Marthe's bedroom. He finished and corrected them until 1922 when Martha was no longer alive.
Marthe Meurier, the wife of Maurice Denis was a pianist, a committed Catholic. For several years, she was the subject of dozens of portraits and the model for Denis’s allegorical paintings. In his personal diary, he kept a lyrical report about his relationship with Marthe recording the shades of his own experiences, new feelings, and the changes in his attitude towards life. This diary would be quoted in long poetic names of lithographic works from the “Love” album, published by Denis six years later. He would call his works ‘Our Souls, In Slow Movement’ or ‘The Twilights Have the Softness of an Old Painting.’ Maurice Denis never ceased to paint Martha since the time of their meeting in 1891 until her death in 1919. He couldn’t get enough of Marthe’s one mood, so he painted ‘Triple Portrait of Marthe’ and the ‘The Muses’, filling the canvases with her image repeated in different moods, looking into her face in the moments of sadness and thoughtfulness, joy and concentration.
In 1895, Denis would compile several lyrical works with Marthe as a subject in a large-scale cycle called “Love and Life of a Woman”. A little later, Denis would repeat these same images in a long frieze on the wall of Marthe's bedroom. He finished and corrected them until 1922 when Martha was no longer alive.
