Martha STETTLER (1870-1945) - Lot 53

Martha STETTLER (1870-1945) The Purple Coat Oil on canvas, signed lower left. 89 x 116 cm Provenance : - Acquired by the present owner in 1968. We would like to thank Dr. Corinne Linda Sotzek, who kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work and informed us that it had taken its place in her archives. Born in Bern into a cultured family, Martha Stettler trained first in Switzerland at the Bern Art School, then in Geneva with Léon Gaud and Henri Hébert. She moved to Paris in 1893, where she studied at the Académie Julian, then with Luc-Olivier Merson and Lucien Simon. Her move to Paris reflected a very concrete reality: for a Swiss woman painter of her generation, the French capital offered far greater training, exhibition and career opportunities than were available in Switzerland. Stettler was not just an artist who settled in Paris: she also played an active role. Co-founder of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, she ran it from 1909 to 1945 with Alice Dannenberg. This position is important, as it places her at the heart of Montparnasse's artistic life, not as a passing figure, but as an artist with a lasting commitment to the Parisian milieu. Her work often returns to scenes of children, in Parisian interiors or parks. The Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse explicitly mentions these subjects: children in Parisian parks, interior scenes, landscapes, still lifes and portraits. Public gardens, such as the Tuileries or Luxembourg, offered him a stable, everyday, immediately observable setting: nannies, children, strolling silhouettes, distance relationships between figures, light filtered through trees, clear paths, benches, lawns and plant walls. In our painting, Stettler retains precisely what is the strength of his best Paris scenes: not an event, but a situation seen with acuity. The nanny, seized from behind, occupies the foreground with the dark mass of her purple coat, while the child, seated on the right, introduces a lighter, more fragile note. The garden is not treated as a mere backdrop: it organizes the scene, with its planes of greenery, paths and distant figures. Our painting takes up the same subject as the oil on canvas of the same name, dated circa 1907-1916, 46 61 cm, sold in Basel on March 22, 2023, where the work is listed as F64 in Corinne Sotzek's unpublished catalog. The proximity of the motif begs the question of whether the latter composition, in its smaller format, could be a modello for our canvas. Expert : Agnès SEVESTRE-BARBE