Golden Morning

Le Sidaner painted this work during the productive decade he spent returning repeatedly to the medieval towns of northern France and Belgium, especially Bruges and Gerberoy, seeking subjects in which architecture, water and morning or evening light could be fused into a single luminous impression. By 1906 he had refined his technique toward a system of closely valued chromatic touches that owed something to Pointillism in its analytical separation of colour, yet belonged more properly to the broader current of Post-Impressionism: the marks are not the strict uniform dots of Seurat but varied, vibrant tesserae that follow the form of surfaces while simultaneously dissolving them. Le Sidaner exhibited regularly at the Salon de la Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where his intimate, figure-free townscapes attracted considerable critical attention; the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans was among his early admirers. His work connects the Intimist tendency of the period, associated with Vuillard and Bonnard, to an outdoor architectural subject: the canal bridge stands in for the quiet corner of a bourgeois interior, both scenes pared of incident to focus all attention on the quality of light itself. The painting is held in esteem as representative of Le Sidaner's distinctive synthesis: Post-Impressionist structure married to a mood of hushed, almost melancholy tranquility.