Sunday Fair at Les Invalides

Evenepoel painted Parisian life as it was, in snapshots, leaving room for pictorial license, and above all with observations captured in expressive paint and colour. His apartment and studio were on the sixth floor of a building on the corner of avenue de la Motte-Piquet, which crossed esplanade des Invalides and rue Saint-Dominique. From his studio window he had a…

Evenepoel painted Parisian life as it was, in snapshots, leaving room for pictorial license, and above all with observations captured in expressive paint and colour. His apartment and studio were on the sixth floor of a building on the corner of avenue de la Motte-Piquet, which crossed esplanade des Invalides and rue Saint-Dominique. From his studio window he had a bird’s-eye view of Les Invalides and the busy Sunday funfairs. He wrote to his father to say that he first sketched the scene on paper in bright sunshine – an effect he tried to mimic in the painting. This canvas shows why Evenepoel was described in his day as a ‘peintre de la tache’, ‘a master colourist in the true sense of the word’. Being born and bred in Brussels, he felt indebted to the art of his native country, to painters who loved ‘the romantic colour [red]’, who ‘have eaten of it’. He very often painted full, vermilion reds that guide the composition, order the forms and the bright light. In this painting, as well as adding touches of red in rapid daubs alongside people in motion, he gave suggestions of the outlines of tents and roofs. The red daubs, sometimes combined with complementary blue, also help to accentuate the different compositional zones. They establish the seething nature of the dead straight fairground streets, which appear from his studio window to cut through the landscape, and in particular the rich greenery of the tree canopies. In the background the outlines of the Church of St Clotilde stand out against dynamically rendered banks of clouds. The painting was first exhibited between 30 December and 7 January 1897-1898 at a solo show at the Brussels Cercle Artistique et Littéraire, together with a slightly smaller version of the scene titled Weekday fair near Les Invalides. Evenepoel was in Algiers during the exhibition. His generally critical father, who lived in Brussels, congratulated him effusively for the show, which featured 60 of his best works.