Gustave GEFFROY (1855-1926). Autograph manuscript signed, Le - Lot 94

Gustave GEFFROY (1855-1926). Autograph manuscript signed, Le Salon de 1900; 17 1/2 pages in-8. Article by an art critic, with erasures and corrections, published in La Vie artistique. Geffroy reports on the exhibition taking place at Place Breteuil, poorly housed in a camp of wood and canvas, and bringing together 2872 works. Among the "painters of life" he cites Emile Wéry and his painting Les Pêcheurs, Amsterdam, Jules Adler showing working-class life in his painting of Le Creusot and Schumacher the diggers in Bâtissant une ville. Many of his paintings are about life in the fields and at sea, and many others are anecdotes; but there are also "painters who are painters": Charles Sims (Childhood), Hugues de Beaumont (Taste). When it comes to history, nothing excites him; he points to L'Enlèvement by Paul Jamin, and Georges Rouault's Salomé, in which he sees "nothing at all, but literally nothing"...As for allegories, he likes Louis Béroud's Allégorie de la Ville de Paris, "but the figures and the landscape are not in harmony", and he sees in Adolphe Lalyre's Les Sirènes vaincues par les Muses only "models, and nothing but models, or rather the same model multiplied"... etc..., etc. Geoffroy appreciated the nudes by J.J. Henner (Rêve), Henri Martin (La Beauté), Jules Pagès (La Toilette du modèle), Paul Chabas (les Derniers Rayons) and others. Among the portraits, he noticed those by Ferdinand Humbert, Lauth, Fougerat, Stephen Liégeard by Benjamin-Constant, etc. He also saw many interior scenes, landscapes by well-known painters such as Harpignies (Oliviers et chênes à Beaulieu), and new ones such as Louis Cabié (Le Soir à Tursac, Dordogne), and so on. He appreciates Les Bords fleuris de la Loire and still lifes by Achille Cesbron, others with heaps of oysters and fruit and "L'aiguière d'argent de M. Blaise Desgoffe est toujours infiniment reluisante". He concludes with drawings, engravings, lithographs and sculpture...