Maximilien Luce, Le Peintre Terrus

(French, 1858-1941)

Portrait of the painter Etienne Terrus, circa 1905, signed lower left "Luce", oil on canvas, 32 x 25-7/8 in.; gilt wood and composition frame, 41 x 35 x 3-3/4 in.

Provenance: Montgomery Gallery, San Francisco, No. 148 (label verso); Private Collection, United Kingdom; Sotheby's New York, February 23, 2006, Lot 31, sold for $72,000; Private Collection, Kansas City

Note: "Four days after arriving in Collioure in the Pyrenees-Orientales region of the south of France, in May 1905, Henri Matisse described in a letter to a friend how he had met a local artist, "un peintre des independants, ami de [Maximilien] Luce, qui s'appelle Terrus et qui est tres agreable de compagnie".
Etienne Terrus (1857-1922) was born in Elne, near Perpignan; apart from a brief period spent studying art in Paris in the 1880s, he remained in the town all his life, never achieving the fame of the artists who knew him, including not only Matisse and Luce, but Picasso, Derain, Maillol and Vlaminck. Matisse freely admitted to having been influenced by Terrus, through an exchange of correspondence which began that summer and continued until 1917; the impact of this obscure painter on all the Fauves may have been critical to the formulation of their breakthrough innovations in 1905." -Sotheby's New York, 2006
Condition Report: original stretcher and tacking edge, minor areas of crackle; frame with abrasions