Georges de FEURE, La ferme blanche

Georges de Feure
(Paris 1868-1943)
The White Farm
circa 1905
oil on canvas
50 x 65 cm

The son of a Dutch architect, Georges de Feure was born in Paris in 1868. His career began as a newspaper illustrator. In 1900, the discovery of his interiors and decorative objects for the Art Nouveau Bing Pavilion at the World's Fair brought him international renown. Steeped in Symbolist thought, he embodied this movement. In 1903, a first retrospective was dedicated to him at Siegfried Bing; 155 paintings, watercolors, and lithographs were exhibited alongside a wide variety of decorative objects, including some fifty of De Feure's landscapes. He emerged as a talented landscape artist.

The most surprising development in De Feure's art was undoubtedly his landscape painting.

Although a work simply titled Landscape had been included in Georges de Feure's Watercolors nearly ten years earlier, and Walcheren Island had been exhibited at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1896, this was the first and most important presentation of such works, with over fifty of them dominating the exhibition. René Puaux even considered it to be the artist's "most recent revelation."
From then on, the artist almost always chose to exhibit landscapes.
Marked by the influence of Japanese art, De Feure, according to the critic René Puaux, "applied the marvelous Japanese technique to the European landscape and created a new style." Many of those listed in the catalog were views of Bois-le-Roi, but we can safely say that ours represents a Flemish landscape, so characteristically does it bear. It is also possible to compare it with a view of the same region, which Puaux had reproduced in The Works of Georges de Feure in 1903.