Henri Eugène Le Sidaner (French, 1862-1939) Le jardin blanc, 1912 Graphite and colored pencil on paper 9-1/2 x 13-1/2 inches (24.1 x 34.3 cm) Signed and inscribed lower left: À M. [Jean] Viaud [Bruant] / amicalement / Le Sidaner PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF ELAINE AND PERRY SNYDERMAN, HIGHLAND PARK, ILLINOIS PROVENANCE: Jean Viaud-Bruant; Galleries Maurice Sternberg, Chicago, Illinois; Worthington Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 1979. EXHIBITED: Musée Galliera, Paris, "Retrospective Le Sidaner," April 1948. LITERATURE: J. Viaud-Bruant, Jardins d'Artistes: Les Peintres-Jardiniers, Poitiers-Vienne, 1916, illustrated on the cover. Representing a section of the artist's garden at Gerberoy, this magnificent drawing is a completely finished study for the painting Le jardin blanc au crépuscule in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. Le Sidanier dedicated this ethereal drawing to the celebrated nurseryman and horticulturalist from Poitiers, Jean Viand-Bruant, who featured it on the cover of his book on artists' gardens, which included garden paintings by Henri Lebasque, Maurice Denis, Henri Martin Auguste, Rodin, Armand Guillaumin, Hélène Dufour, Auguste Lepère, and Albert Lebourg, among many others. Jean Viand-Bruant's spiritual attitude towards plants was chronicled in 1914, the same year as his Jardins d'Artistes appeared, in U.L.T. [The United Lodge of Theosophists' weekly magazine published in San Francisco, California], Vol. I, No. 2, May 14, 1914, p. 82: "M. Jean Viaud-Bruant supplies the latest fragment of evidence of the consciousness and even the sensibility of ‘inanimate' things, if we may use a term already becoming scientifically unfashionable. M. Viand-Bruant. . . says that his attention was first directed towards the consciousness of plants when he saw ‘the climbing plant turn towards the support necessary for its progress,' and so he began to wonder whether a will directed its movements and whether it could actually see. He says he is persuaded that plants can see, or at least they have some faculty that corresponds with sight, and that they not only see, but can hear. ‘The sensitive plant,' he tells us, ‘folds us its leaves in a fright if a loud noise is made near it. This same plant. . . is rendered insensible by anaesthetics, particularly by ether, which proves it has a nervous system.' M. Viand-Bruant is also inclined to think that plants have a system of speech peculiar to them, and he submits the following hypothesis: ‘We know that the scent of flowers is a manifestation of their vegetable life, a living radiation. Scent considered as an olfactory sensation is a vibration. Scent, then, is the sound uttered by flowers, and a bouquet is a song without words. Every scent, or rather every sensation of a scent, corresponds to a certain speed of vibration, which is peculiar to it; here we see an analogy between the perception of sound, light, and scent. Strong scents correspond to low notes; delicate scents to high notes." HID03101062020 © 2020 Heritage Auctions | All Rights Reserved