Maurice DENIS (1870-1943)

The Music Lesson, ca. 1907. Oil on cardboard. Signed lower left with the monogram MB. 116 x 98 cm. Study for one of the murals executed by Maurice Denis in 1907 for the decoration of the hallway of the private mansion of Jacques Rouché, future director of the Paris Opera. Jacques Rouché, future director of the Paris Opera. His two daughters are represented here, on the right, singing. This work will appear in the catalog raisonné of the works of Maurice Denis under the title: "La Leçon de Musique, étude pour Terre latine, décoration Rouché, c. 1907". Attached certificate of Dominique Denis, son of Maurice Denis, dated February 3, 1988. Provenance: - private collection, Nice. - sale Maître Rouillac in Cheverny, 22 June 1991. Jacques Rouché (1862-1957), music critic, director of the Théâtre des Arts and then, from 1914, of the Paris Opera, turned to innovative artists to decorate his private mansion on the Plaine Monceau in Paris. He commissioned a ceiling for his hallway from Maurice Denis, who in 1907 created a decoration on the theme of Latin Earth, inspiring art and poetry. The characteristics of the space to be decorated stimulated the painter's creativity and the cut-out forms of Latin Earth follow the architecture of a vault. The decoration is composed of three large allegorical panels, Plastic Art, Poetry, Music, as well as a Landscape, intended for the top of the entrance door and extended by two vertical door frames. A stained glass window in two parts, one of which - Nude with a Mirror - is preserved in the Maurice Denis Museum, completes the decor. The whole is an evocation of the arts of classical humanity, which are staged on earth, while their allegory sails in the heavens. The panels are set in Mediterranean landscapes, for which Maurice Denis recalls his trip to the South of France in 1906 when he visited Cézanne. The various scenes include real and imaginary characters, and among them an artist, Maillol, depicted sculpting a statue. The final canvases, once painted by Rouché himself and kept in his last house in Saint-Germain (the present music conservatory), were acquired by the city of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and deposited in the Maurice Denis Museum, which also keeps sketches of this décor from the artist's studio collection (text taken from the Maurice Denis Museum website).