DOI Heft:
No. 228 (March 1912)
DOI Artikel:Honoré, Léopold: An Alsatian landscpae painter: Henri Zuber
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21156#0132
Henri Zuber
The life of labour and of well-doing of this
master of landscape is summed up in his works,
those works which attain a degree of perfection
which the artist’s own modest nature never allowed
him to recognise in them. Zuber had a very
delicate and sensitive nature, and these qualities
we find in each one of his pictures.
Writing of the works Zuber sent to the Salon of
1897, M. Lafenestre said in the “Revue des Deux
Mondes” : “In M. Henri Zuber’swork, as in that
of the masters of another generation, one finds the
same discreet and silent admiration for the great
and beautiful spectacles of nature, the same desire
to transcribe her intimate joys with a fidelity that
is moving, and the same knowledge and experience
in doing so. His two landscapes are most admir-
able works. In one we have the soft, melancholy
sadness of the big olive-trees bathed in pale light,
in the other the poignant dumb anguish of the sun-
baked earth under the menace of huge rain-clouds,
rendered with touching sincerity. No display, no
fuss in these poems of the country. All is said,
and said finely, in a manner at once concise, sane,
restrained, and well chosen, and the word, that is
to say the touch, is always right and always in its
proper place.” Impossible to express better or
with more eloquence the impression received at
sight of Henri Zuber’s work.
At the commencement of his career, and while
yet influenced by his studies in Gleyre’s atelier,
Henri Zuber had some thoughts of devoting him-
self to historical painting, and attempted this in one
of his earliest pictures, Dante et Virgile (in the gallery
at Orleans). The idea was fugitive, but it helped
to cultivate style in the artist.
Zuber worked equally well in oils and in water-
colour, and used both processes in turn with
success, and with the same object always, of pro-
ducing a work of art. For twenty years he con-
tributed largely to the success of the Societe des
Aquerellistes Frangais. He understood thoroughly
the fundamental principles of aquarelle, and his
112
The life of labour and of well-doing of this
master of landscape is summed up in his works,
those works which attain a degree of perfection
which the artist’s own modest nature never allowed
him to recognise in them. Zuber had a very
delicate and sensitive nature, and these qualities
we find in each one of his pictures.
Writing of the works Zuber sent to the Salon of
1897, M. Lafenestre said in the “Revue des Deux
Mondes” : “In M. Henri Zuber’swork, as in that
of the masters of another generation, one finds the
same discreet and silent admiration for the great
and beautiful spectacles of nature, the same desire
to transcribe her intimate joys with a fidelity that
is moving, and the same knowledge and experience
in doing so. His two landscapes are most admir-
able works. In one we have the soft, melancholy
sadness of the big olive-trees bathed in pale light,
in the other the poignant dumb anguish of the sun-
baked earth under the menace of huge rain-clouds,
rendered with touching sincerity. No display, no
fuss in these poems of the country. All is said,
and said finely, in a manner at once concise, sane,
restrained, and well chosen, and the word, that is
to say the touch, is always right and always in its
proper place.” Impossible to express better or
with more eloquence the impression received at
sight of Henri Zuber’s work.
At the commencement of his career, and while
yet influenced by his studies in Gleyre’s atelier,
Henri Zuber had some thoughts of devoting him-
self to historical painting, and attempted this in one
of his earliest pictures, Dante et Virgile (in the gallery
at Orleans). The idea was fugitive, but it helped
to cultivate style in the artist.
Zuber worked equally well in oils and in water-
colour, and used both processes in turn with
success, and with the same object always, of pro-
ducing a work of art. For twenty years he con-
tributed largely to the success of the Societe des
Aquerellistes Frangais. He understood thoroughly
the fundamental principles of aquarelle, and his
112