Armand Point was born in 1861 in Algiers into a modest family. He lost his parents at a young age and was raised by his aunt before entering the Rollin College in Paris in 1870. He was encouraged by the teaching of Professor Auguste Clément Herst to devote himself to a career as an artist. In 1878, he returned to his native land and became known as an Orientalist painter. In 1882, he presented his first work at the Parisian Salon "Tunisia-Country of 1881", presenting himself as a student of Hippolyte Lazerges. The work was acquired by the State. From the teaching of Hippolyte Lazerges, Armand Point certainly inherited the importance of drawing in the exercise of his art.
In 1889 he moved with his wife to Samois sur Seine, a small village near Fontainebleau, where he met the writer Elemir Bourges who became a close friend of the painter.
In 1892, he exhibited at the 1st Salon de la Rose-Croix at the Durand-Ruel gallery; he was one of the major artists of this salon and designed the poster of the 5th Salon with Léonard Sarluis.
His first trip to Italy in 1893 was a revelation; he immersed himself in the masters of the Renaissance and admired the Florentine primitives. He returned to Italy eight times and finally died there in 1932.
The work we present is a preparatory drawing for the painting "Young Woman with a Green Hat".
The model is his second wife, Helga Weeke, who is the muse of many of his works. The couple stayed in Venice at the end of 1902; it was the fourth trip of the artist and the first of his new wife. We can recognize the bell tower of the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in the background, the Giardini Papadopoli and an emblematic gondola on the canal.
This portrait gives off an intense magnetism in the gaze, a strength of soul that we will illustrate with these words of Gustave Soulier taken from "Art and Life": "The name of Artists of the Soul is well suited to these painters and sculptors, since, far from seeking a purely plastic vision, it is our very soul that they want to touch, by the way of the eyes and the spirit (. ... And certainly, after the Primitives and after Vinci, other painters still succeeded in making us feel secret things and intimate emotions of souls by the inflection of a face, by the astonishing understanding of the eyes and the drawing of the lips. I will quote Armand Point as one of those who have pushed the most forward this analysis. (...) Of Armand Point, one knows the elegant and refined nature, this sensual and almost feminine predilection of the caresses of all things, and these soft figures of woman."
Frame dimensions : width : 55.5cm height : 90cm
