Two Women Sewing, circa 1922

Albert White Gallery, Toronto Canadian Corporate Collection

“Louis Valtat: Rétrospective Centenaire (1869-1968)”, Petit Palais, Genève, 1969, unpaginated

Born in Dieppe, France in 1869 to a wealthy family of ship owners, Louis Valtat spent much of his childhood in Versailles. Encouraged by his father, an amateur landscape painter, the young Valtat studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and later the Barbizon School, where his peers included Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. He opened a studio in Paris in 1890 and soon thereafter began exhibiting paintings of street scenes at the Salon. During this early period in his career, Valtat was particularly drawn to the spontaneous light touches of Impressionism and the colorful, distinct dots of Pointillism. Immersed in the Parisian art scene, in 1894 Voltat collaborated with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the decor for the avant-garde Théâtre de l’Œuvre and later made several visits to Auguste Renoir in Cagnes- sur-Mer, with whom he collaborated on a sculpture of Paul Cézanne. His brushstrokes and colour palette became bolder as he spent more time in the Mediterranean coast, although he never went so far as to fully embrace Fauvism alongside Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, with whom he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1906. In a retrospective at Le Petit Palais in 1969, Georges Peillex comments on the artist serving as the link between Impressionism and Fauvism: “Valtat belongs to a generation of artists in between the Impressionists and post 1900 revolutionaries. It could have been said about him that he represents the indispensable link that accounts for the transition from Monet to Matisse.” Valtat painted a wide variety of subjects that included genre scenes, landscapes, and still life. “Two Women Sewing”, dating to 1922, was painted during a period when the artist spent most of his time at his house in the village of Choisel, about an hour outside of Paris. The drawing is composed of simple yet carefully chosen lines to depict two seated women sewing on their laps. Valtat has added accents of red and royal blue‒a colour palette he adopted while in the south of France, inspired by the Mediterranean sea.