Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Les Amis de Louis Valtat. This work will be included in the forthcoming Louis Valtat catalogue raisonné, currently being prepared.

Provenance
Anon. sale, Ader, Paris, 15 November 2016, lot 45.
Private collection, Paris (acquired at the above sale); their sale, Bonhams, London, 1 March 2018, lot 3.
Private collection, Spain (acquired at the above sale).


The present work stands as an important precursor to both Fauvism and the Nabis movement, and as a major example of Louis Valtat's formative years as a Post-Impressionist painter. Painted during one of his journeys to Spain around 1894, Rue du village, Espagne captures the transformative encounter between the artist and the Mediterranean sun – an experience that profoundly shaped his palette, his compositional structures, and his conception of colour and pattern as autonomous forces for years to come.

The composition depicts a narrow street animated by women in patterned dresses walking along a tortuous sunlit path. The white façades of the houses cast back the blaze of a southern sun beneath a cobalt sky. Bold chromatic contrasts animate the scene: cadmium yellow and crimson are set against passages of cerulean and teal, while dense, shadowy greens gather in the central foliage. Within the central tree, pure white strokes flicker against dark green impasto, breathing volume into the foliage and revealing the fierce brilliance of the Spanish light. Vertical blue shadows punctuate the white palisades, their cadence echoing the figures opposite. These chromatic intervals lend a rhythmic structure that moves the composition beyond description into a decorative, almost musical register – qualities that recall the pictorial experiments of the Nabis.

Valtat's sojourns in Spain between 1894 and 1895 were closely connected to his fragile health. Suffering from tuberculosis, he had undertaken periods of convalescence in Banyuls and Collioure, from where he made excursions across the border to Llançà and Figueras. There, he encountered a landscape of unprecedented intensity: the Mediterranean's saturated tones and sun-drenched villages offered a wholly new visual experience. It was in this context that Valtat first explored the luminous atmospheres and saturated palettes so palpably present in Rue du village, Espagne.

At precisely this time, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was also working in the South of France, and the two artists formed a personal friendship as well as an artistic dialogue. Renoir's mastery of light and colour – exemplified in contemporaneous works such as Paysage à Beaulieu (circa 1893) – offered Valtat a model for translating the brilliance of the Mediterranean onto canvas. Their acquaintance, fostered through shared sojourns and through the dealer Ambroise Vollard (whom Renoir encouraged to represent Valtat), allowed for a direct exchange of ideas. Valtat, however, departed from Impressionism's concern with fleeting illumination, affirming instead a subjective vision: colour no longer merely observed, but imposed as a structural and expressive force.

This immersion in meridional light produced a sequence of canvases with similarly pure tones and vivid contrasts, some of which were exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1896. These works were singled out by Félix Fénéon in La Revue blanche, who recognised their daring palette and freedom of execution as heralding a new pictorial language. Occupying a position between Impressionism's spontaneity and the chromatic audacity of Fauvism, Valtat's canvases also resonate with the decorative ambitions of the Nabis, with their emphasis on rhythm, flatness and the autonomy of colour.

Although painted circa 1894, the aesthetic of Rue du village, Espagne anticipates the stylistic breakthroughs of the early twentieth century, when Valtat moved in the circle of Henri Matisse and André Derain. The compression of form, simplification of architectural detail into flat planes, and chromatic harmonies of cadmium, cobalt and viridian align the work with Fauvist strategies, while the orchestrated rhythm of intervals across the surface evokes the Nabis' pursuit of a 'peinture décorative.' In both directions, colour becomes subject and structure alike, liberating the composition from naturalistic description.

A decade later, at the fateful 1905 Salon d'Automne, Valtat's pioneering role within Fauvism would be confirmed. The exhibition provoked the first great scandal of twentieth-century art, as Louis Vauxcelles derided the exhibitors as les Fauves – 'wild beasts.' Alongside Matisse, Derain, Camoin, Manguin, Marquet, Vlaminck and Van Dongen, Valtat's canvases were accused of resembling 'a pot of paint thrown in the public's face.' The scandal was so outrageous that the French President, Émile Loubet, refused to endorse the Salon d'Automne, and word spread like wildfire amongst the Parisian Belle Époque society. As a result, before long, scores of Parisians rushed to the exhibition to witness what critics had described as 'shapeless bariolages' and 'delirious brushes.' This notoriety marked the triumph of a radically new pictorial language.

Rue du village, Espagne anticipates this revolution, standing at a decisive turning point in Valtat's career. His style grew freer, his touch more energetic, as his compositions reconciled tradition with modernity. But while he occupied an intermediate position between Post-Impressionism, the decorative idiom of the Nabis, and the chromatic daring of Fauvism, Valtat remained fiercely independent. The present work epitomises this transitional moment for the artist, offering a vivid testament to Valtat's role as a bridge between fin-de-siècle modernism and the avant-garde of the new century.