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“...how I suddenly envied being a painter, a landscape painter like Butler, to have a house in the middle of the fields, all padded with warmth in winter and imbued with family sweetness, with large windows wide open in summer, to let in all the strong plant scents—ripening wheat, greening trees, blooming flowers—and the immense celestial azure that brings a pure joy to the contours of things...”
- Raymond Viallate, January 1912. As fall approaches, one yearns to slow down time and embrace the last few days of summer—enjoying that early morning light spilling through your window, drying the dew-covered earth with rays of sunlight that heat your skin and travel in on a warm breeze. This feeling of summer longing was shared by the art dealer Raymond Viallate when visiting the studio of Theodore Earl Butler in Giverny—on a day Viallate describes as “a stormy rain; the sky deigned to spread only a dull, dirty day.” Viallate was there to discuss and choose artworks for Butler’s upcoming solo exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. As the rain poured down outside, “Butler paraded before our eyes some of his paintings from last summer,” canvases full of vibrant colors capturing the majestic nature of Giverny, the surrounding Normandy countryside, and France’s northern coastline. In the exhibition catalogue, Viallate describes his reaction to Butler’s canvases in detail as “these bold notations of nature, these impressions of an artist especially enamored of color and light.” Trees at Giverny, c. 1906, is a classic example of Butler’s summer landscapes that captured Viallate’s imagination on that rainy day. Created a few years before Butler’s exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Trees at Giverny represents a place of transition for the artist and a divergence from Monet’s color palette. It is the Fauvist colors of orange and blue discreetly placed in the foreground, creating shadows in the trees that offset the sunlight on the forest clearing in the center of the canvas, that make this piece breathtaking. Butler has combined the principles of Fauvism and Impressionism and created his own style. In 1905, the Fauves made their public debut at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. Butler would have seen the exhibition and read the scathing critiques. While the Fauvist movement is documented as first starting in 1904, as early as 1898, Butler was experimenting with the principles of Fauvism with wild brush strokes and strident color, as seen in Monet’s Daughter, Suzanne, and Her Children. By the time Butler exhibited alongside the Fauves in the Salon d’Automne in 1907, he had muted the intensity of color and brush strokes found in earlier paintings and created canvases that subtly explored both the small individual brush strokes of Impressionism and the pairing of complementary colors in Fauvism. Trees at Giverny, an example of Butler’s independent artistic style developed over twenty years of study, reminds us of those last days of summer. The season is about to change, but not today. Today, we soak up the sun on a morning stroll through the French countryside..
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