“Barques et lampions la nuit sur la mer à Cagnes”

Medium	Oil on canvas
Size	24.00" × 29.00" (61.0cm × 73.7cm)
Framed Size	29.00" × 34.00" (73.7cm × 86.4cm)
Dated	c. 1905
Condition	Very good condition
Provenance	This work will be included in Tome III of the Catalogue Raisonne of the work of Ferdinand Du Puigaudeau currently under preparation by Antoine Laurentin. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Antoine Laurentin and a certificate of authenticity is available from Galerie Laurentin (www.galerie-laurentin.com)

Summary

Night on the water, boats hung with paper lanterns, the dark sea broken by reflected colour — this is Ferdinand Loyen du Puigaudeau (1864–1930) at the very centre of his obsession. His contemporaries called him the painter of fireworks, rockets and nocturnal festivals, and the New York Herald in 1903 described him simply as "the painter of fireworks, rockets, sun and gay landscapes." No description of him could be more precise, or more inadequate, because what he actually painted was light — its behaviour at the edge of darkness, its capacity to transform the mundane into something close to magical. The lampions — the small coloured lanterns hung on boats for festival nights along the Mediterranean coast — gave him exactly the conditions he loved: points of warm colour against the dark, their reflections moving on the water below, the whole scene unstable and luminous and alive. The palette in this canvas moves between the deep blues and blacks of the night sea and the warm golds, oranges and reds of the lantern light, with the reflections doing the work of connecting the two registers. Nothing is fixed. Everything shimmers. Du Puigaudeau was born in Nantes in 1864 and largely self-taught before arriving at Pont-Aven in 1886, where he befriended Gauguin and absorbed the lessons of that extraordinary colony without surrendering his own deeply individual vision. Through his father he came to know Paul Durand-Ruel, the great dealer of the Impressionists. Edgar Degas purchased one of his paintings in 1897, and the two maintained a warm friendship and correspondence for the rest of their lives — Degas calling him affectionately "the hermit of Kervaudu." His work is held in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper.

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