Jacques Martin-Ferrières à Marquayrol 1910

Henri Martin painted Jacques Martin-Ferrières à Marquayrol with oil on canvas, and I’m completely drawn in by Martin's mark-making. The surface is alive with small strokes of colour, like a mosaic, and yet the overall impression is soft, gentle, and somehow complete. There is an intimacy here, that is both tender and kind. Look at the way the shadow falls, in small bursts of deep colour, on the threshold between the garden and the shadowed foreground. The dappled sunlight seems to be caught in his paint like memory itself. His process of artmaking feels, therefore, like a way of seeing and experiencing the world as much as representing it. Looking at this piece I can’t help but think of Pierre Bonnard, who also managed to take something rigorous and formal, like pointillism, and turn it into something entirely his own.