Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Victor Prouvé
Nancy 1858 - 1943 Sétif
18
The Violinist: Louis Hekking
Oil on canvas.
Signed, dated and dedicated upper left: V or . Prouvé à l’ami Hekking/ bien cordialement/ 1886.
89 x 104 cm. (33 x 41 in.)
Provenance: A gift from the artist to his friend Louis Hekking; thence by descent.
Exhibited: Salon of 1888, no.2082; Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rétrospective Victor Prouvé, May 1947;
Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Peinture et Art Nouveau, 1999, cat.10, illus. p.37.
Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Victor Prouvé. Les années de l’École de
Nancy, 2008, p.64, and note 54, p.124, note.28 (with incorrect measurements).
Prouvé was born in Nancy, a city of textiles and he
entered the Design School there before studying at
the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and in the studio
of Alexandre Cabanel. He became a portrait and
landscape painter primarily but also a sculptor and
he was active in the decorative arts making designs
for leather, embroidery and jewelry, for glass and
for posters and book covers. In 1900, he became a
founding member of the Art Nouveau movement in
Nancy, with his friends Emile Gallé and Emile Friant
and was made head of the movement in 1904. His
paintings were exhibited regularly at the Salons
in Paris resulting in numerous public and private
commissions including the decorations for the
staircase of the Issy-les-Moulineaux hôtel de ville, a
large canvas of a Bacchanale for the famous brasserie
La Lorraine and the Croix de Bourgogne monument,
both in Nancy. From 1919-1940 Prouvé was the
director of the Nancy École des Beaux-Arts. He had a
large family and very often worked on projects with
the assistance of his wife, Marie.
The violinist Louis Hekking (1854-1938) was a
professor at the Nancy Conservatoire de musique; he
played in the orchestra of the Nancy opera and with
a string quartet who often performed for the salons of
Nancy society figures. When the critic Emile Hinzelin
saw this painting at the Salon of 1888 he commented
in the Nancy journal, La Lorraine-Artiste (10 June): This
musician artist, in expectation of inspiration, adjusts his
bow with his sensitive fingers, entirely accomplished.
Nature, the clement benefactress, has granted all his
wishes : she has even managed, by unusual caprice,
to match his beard and hair to the wood of his
instrument. 1888 was an important year for Prouvé;
he had just returned from spending four months in
Tunisia when he presented this canvas at the Salon
and was emerging from his early academic style with
a more liberated and expressive technique. He moved
back to Nancy and worked with Gallé on entries for
the Universal Exhibition of 1889. Spending time in
the generous company of the Republican lawyer Léon
Grillon and his wife, he encountered a sophisticated
cultural world for which the defence of contemporary
art was an important subject.
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