Maurice Denis’ life and art were constantly informed by his deep Christian faith, and his love of Italian pre-Renaissance religious art. In an essay on religious painting published in the journal L’Art et la vie in 1896, he wrote:
‘If God had so willed it that I had been born several centuries earlier, in the Florence of the time of Brother Savonarola, without a doubt I would have been one of those who defended the aesthetic of the Middle Ages, with a youthful and burning ardour, against the invasion of classical paganism. I would have been one of the pious resisters, one of those faithful to the hieratism of the past, for whom the new ideas signalled a swift decadence. A little pupil of Fra Angelico, making my way from San Marco to the Piazza della Signoria on feast days, among repentant painters and the crowds of believers, I would have spat on the Renaissance!’1Maurice Denis, ‘Notes sur la peinture religieuse,’ L’Art et la vie, no. 54, Oct. 1896, p. 644
He also stated here that: ‘A photograph of a Primitive [i.e. pre-Renaissance] work of art suffices, amidst the disorder and tumult of life, to remind us of our soul, whose movements are sublime, and which is consoled by a pure light unknown to us.’ .2Denis, p. 645.
As a teenager, Denis studied classics at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet, where his classmates included the future actor and theatre director Aurélien Lugné-Poe, and artists Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel. Denis began visiting the Musée du Louvre at age fifteen, where he was drawn to the works of Fra Angelico and Botticelli in particular. In his eighteenth year, Denis enrolled at the Académie Julian private art school, and was also admitted into the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied under the academic master Jules Lefebvre, whose La Cigale, 1872, is in the NGV Collection and on display. Denis, residing in Young and Jackson’s Hotel in Melbourne’s CBD. At the Académie Julian, Denis was to meet Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Gabriel Ibels and Paul Ranson; together with Vuillard, Lugné-Poe and Roussel, all these artists formed the Nabis (Prophets), a group dedicated to creating a new type of art reflecting personal emotion and influenced by the art of the time, and in 1891, Denis declared, ‘I think that first and foremost, a painting must be essentially decorative. Our interference, by way of expression, must always aim to reach this end in joyous and harmonious emotion.’ 3Jacques Daurelle, ‘Chez les jeunes peintres’, L’Écho de Paris, 28 Dec. 1891, p. 2.
In 1893 Denis married Marthe Meurier, and the couple moved to the Villa Monticelli in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, beyond the outskirts of Paris, where Denis’s parents had settled in 1870 and which was to be Denis’s base for his whole life. In April 1895 Maurice and Marthe visited Italy for the first time, travelling to Tuscany and Umbria. Here, Denis was able to study firsthand the ‘primitive’ fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian masterworks that he had long admired and studied from photographs.
Visit to the upper room (Visite dans la chambre violette), 1899, embodies Denis’s love of Italian art, and depicts Marthe Denis shortly after the birth of the couple’s daughter Bernadette on 7 April 1899. Marthe’s face has the profile of a Fra Angelico Madonna, while the tousle-headed baby at the left resembles countless cherubic angels found in quattrocento paintings. The soft pastel palette and chalky surface of the work also deliberately evoke the aesthetic effect of Italian fresco paintings. The newborn Bernadette is being held by Marthe’s visitor Jeanne Mathurin, who is accompanied by her son Jacques, the cherubic infant. Adrien Mithouard (1854–1919) was for many years president of the Conseil Municipal de Paris (Paris City Council), as well as a prominent poet and essayist. He published several volumes of Symbolist verse, including L’Iris exaspéré, 1896 and Les Impossibles Notes, 1896. In 1901 he founded the influential Revue L’Ochaldéen, which was dedicated to preserving Western Christian values in art and literature. Denis was an important collaborator on this project and the two families were bonded by both the love of art and their Christian faith.
Denis can be described as working in strong shades of lilac and blue reflects the Nabis’ experimentation with bold interior decoration. And, at the top of the painting, one of the decorative panels that Denis painted for the room, depicting the stages in a woman’s life, can be discerned: The Engagement, The Wedding, Embroidery by the Sea, The Child, Flowering Prayer and The Death. These panels are now held in the Musée départemental Maurice Denis in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
Maurice Denis, Visit to the upper room (Visite dans la chambre violette), 1899, oil on canvas, standing donation by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023 © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY / NGV International.
Dr Ted Gott is NGV Senior Curator, International Art.
This article first appeared in the July–August 2024 edition of NGV Magazine.
Notes
Maurice Denis, ‘Notes sur la peinture religieuse,’ L’Art et la vie, no. 54, Oct. 1896, p. 644.
Denis, p. 645.
Jacques Daurelle, ‘Chez les jeunes peintres’, L’Écho de Paris, 28 Dec. 1891, p. 2.