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53 - Martha STETTLER (1870-1945) The Purple Coat Oil on canvas, s…
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Estimate €5,000 - €8,000
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Description
Martha STETTLER (1870-1945) The Purple Coat Oil on canvas, signed lower left. 89 x 116 cm Provenance : - Acquired by the current 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 been placed 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 opportunities for training, exhibition and career than were available in Switzerland. Stettler was not just an artist who settled in Paris: she played an active role there. She co-founded the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and ran it from 1909 to 1945 with Alice Dannenberg. This position is important, because it places her at the heart of the artistic life of Montparnasse, 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. The public gardens, particularly the Tuileries and the Luxembourg, provided him with a stable, everyday, immediately observable scene: nannies, children, figures out for a stroll, the distance between figures, light filtered through trees, light-filled paths, benches, lawns and green 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 simple backdrop: it organises the scene, with its planes of greenery, its paths and its distant figures. Our painting takes the same subject as the oil on canvas of the same name, dated c. 1907-1916, 46 61 cm, which went on sale in Basel on 22 March 2023, where the work is listed as F64 in Corinne Sotzek's unpublished catalogue. The proximity of the motif begs the question of whether this smaller composition might be a modello for our painting. - Expert : Agnès SEVESTRE-BARBE
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About the sale 20TH CENTURY ART
Auction location
Auction time 06/05/2026 at 1:30 PM
Ref. : 15191 - 62
Lot description modified on 05/22/2026 at 3:26 PM
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