LUCIEN LÉVY-DHURMER
French, 1865-1923

Bourrasque (Gust of Wind)

Signed with initials L.L.
Oil on canvas
42 x 23½ inches (106.7 x 59.7 cm)
Framed: 52 x 33 inches (132 x 84 cm)

Painted in 1896, this seminal work by Lévy-Dhurmer represents the culmination of numerous smaller studies of the head of this female figure, mostly in pastel. One of these studies is in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest (illustrated below).

The theme depicted in Bourrasque (this being the only version depicting the full length figure), and the various studies of the woman’s head, is that of a femme fatale caught in a gust of wind in an autumnal woodland setting surrounded by a swirling mass of falling leaves. Lévy-Dhurmer had a "Baudelarian passion for hair" (Philippe Jullian, Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s, New York, 1971, p. 168). The allegorical nature of this autumnal subject, depicting a mysterious long-haired woman entwined with nature - both sublime and tragic - recurs often in the artist’s work as he explores other seasons and mythological themes.

Bourrasque was one of two paintings which Lévy-Dhurmer selected to be his first exhibits at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris, in the year 1896, and it was one of only eight oil paintings included in the artist’s first one-man exhibition earlier in the same year at Galerie Georges Petit. This exhibition was made possible with the support of his friend and patron, the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach, whose portrait by the artist is in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay and whose daughter he later portrayed with the city of Bruges in the background.

Provenance
Whitford and Hughes, London, by 1985
Sale, Sotheby's, New York, February 17, 1993, lot 87, illustrated
Private Collection
Sale, Sotheby's, New York, February 12, 1997, lot 72, illustrated
Stair Sainty Gallery, London
Private Collection, New England

Exhibited
Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Tableaux et Pastels de M. L. Lévy-Dhurmer, 1896, no. 3
Paris, Salon des Artistes Français, 1896, no. 1261
London, Whitford and Hughes, Moments et Folies de la Femme Fatale, 1985, no. 8, illustrated

Literature
Autour de Lévy-Dhurmer: Visionnaires et Intimistes en 1900 [exhibition catalogue], Grand Palais, Paris, 1973, pp. 47-8, the present work mentioned in the entries for nos. 65 and 66, both studies for Bourrasque

P.O.R.

LUCIEN LÉVY-DHURMER, Study for "Bourrasque"
Pastel on paper, 15 x 23 inches
[Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest]