Studio: international art (56.1912)

Lucien Simon

execution, in the happy balance of the masses, in
the brilliance of its colour, the justness of its tonality,
and in the vigour and sobriety of its technique, this
picture is both an epitome of the sympathetic
impressions of its creator and a general description
of the sailor’s life.

Take this other big picture which its author
entitles La Barque. Here we see a sailing-boat
moving into the shadows of a tree-lined shore.
It is a scene set down against a luminous back-
ground. A little girl stands up against the mast
and smilingly regards her sister, who reclines in the
bow, her head resting on her hands, her face lit up
by the sunlight, and her eyes full of day-dreams,
charmed by the beauty of the hour and by a, no
doubt, unconscious pleasure of happy youth. At
the tiller is a young man in dark jersey and
khaki trousers, while on the left a big sail fills with
the breeze and an expanse of sky and sea makes up
the background. Here again the idea of the

picture was suggested to the'painter directly by a
real incident. These children are his own, the
boat belongs to them, this spot of nature is their
own familiar landscape. Out with them one day
he saw this harmony of blue and grey enriched by
the apricot hue of the girls’ frocks and the yellow
of the khaki trousers of their elder brother.

Simon has asked of what are composed the
special tones of this general harmony, and he has
struggled to reproduce them on his canvas while
leaving to each of these big spots of colour its own
bigness and special vitality. It was a task which
demanded long study and many fruitless attempts.
But if he loved this picture so rapidly seen, if he
has tried to stop the passage of time to prolong it
and fix it upon canvas, it was because his own son
and his own daughters contributed to this harmony,
and them he has lovingly painted. He has lingered
tenderly over the face of the youngest girl, in which
the sweetness of childhood is tempered by a