My Story

For all his versatility, Jean Colin was primarily a portraitist, although he also painted numerous other subjects: family scenes, still lifes, townscapes and country scenes, seascapes… Apart from oils, he also created – albeit to a lesser extent – water colours, gouaches, charcoal drawings, pen and ink drawings and etchings. He usually worked in an impressionistically tinted realistic style, but he also made – especially during the 1910s and early 1920s – impressionistic, luministic and fauvist paintings. Colin worked in the studio as well as in the open air.

In the beginning, during his years at the drawing school and the art academy, the artist thought about becoming a sculptor. To date, we have not recovered any of his sculptures, only one authentic black-and-white photograph of a female bust, but several elements point in the direction of his activity as a sculptor. In the canvas Études de félins [Sketches of felines] (#107) from 1903, we see the anatomical sketches that often served as preliminary studies for three-dimensional reproductions. Indeed, we remember that he was taught at the art academy by the sculptor Pierre Charles Van der Stappen, for which he was awarded the ’Grand Prize for Sculpture’. Numerous cursory drawings from his reports on the Prix de Rome – most of which were based on works by Michelangelo – also provide evidence of his interest in sculpture, and after his death a modelling stand was recovered at his studio. In the 1928 exhibition catalogue of the Galeries du Studio, Arthur De Rudder said the following about this: ‘During his period of training, he turned his mind to decorative art. (…) He turned away from this art form quite soon in order to focus on the canvas, which is more connected to his feeling for nuance and the subtleties of the play of colours.’

A thorough command of colour and the powerful brushstroke are characteristic of Jean Colin’s work. Purely realistic works by him are rather rare. He almost always worked with an impressionistic touch, although this is not dominant in the major part of his oeuvre, but merely a technical way of emphasising that ‘laid the paint on thicker’ in the image. We may speak here of a reasoned and reduced impressionism, albeit in different gradations. After all, Colin was an independent artist, not bound by the rules of one or other artistic trend, who consciously made ‘products’ to meet his patrons’ aesthetic needs. He did not belong to the group of notorious, progressive artists who voluntarily opted for a difficult existence. Colin wanted to make a living from his work, did not need posthumous praise. He wanted to be a successful professional painter – a great enough challenge in itself –, not an artist on the breadline forced to selling his experiments at ridiculously low prices.
The great example of the penniless artist had been Vincent van Gogh, with – according to legend – only one of his paintings actually sold during his lifetime, and that only happened during the last year of his life.9 Rik Wouters would also resolutely opt for the difficult route by only wanting to make ‘purely’ artistic work. Consequently, Van Gogh was Rik’s idol. On the very first day after his first encounter with his great love and later partner in life Nel, Rik is said to have confided to her that he was a down-and-outer. Next, he asked her whether she would be prepared to suffer the agony of going through hell for his art, and whether she would not complain if they were to go hungry in the process. ‘For,’ he warned her, ‘until I am a great artist, we will see a lot of misery.’

Because he made – as promised – no concessions for his burgeoning art, at first Wouters often had to carry out work for third parties (including at a furniture-making shop and a china factory) and
– against his wishes – mould portraits to provide them with the basic necessities of life.
Jean Colin did not want to play such a role of forerunner and champion. He never threw himself into the artistic turmoil. Colin did not feel called upon to be an ‘improver of art’,  but      he was a conservative – albeit highly gifted – academic artist, primarily exhibiting his works at local art societies such as those in Anderlecht, Tournai, Charleroi, Auderghem and La Louvière. Such, rather conservative, exhibition associations were especially popular among conservative but well-to-do patrons. Consequently, Colin mainly made accessible works, saleable art that did not require a new way of seeing. At most, he could only ‘sell’ his customers a light impressionistic touch
– the meaning of the clear drawing had to prevail. The plainer his approach was, the more accessible it was to his audience. Such canvases – I repeat: the major part of his oeuvre –, where he applies impressionism in an informal way and adapts it to a simplified style, stand for the understandability his audience expected at the time – in contrast to the ‘pure’ impressionistic works by pioneers, who initially only drew the attention of fellow-artists, art critics and forward-looking art lovers.
Colin’s potential buyers would take the decorative aspects of a painting into consideration. After all, it had to fit in with their interior, or – to put it even more disrespectfully – should not jar with the wallpaper. Colin largely met the taste of that large audience and by doing so, succeeded in his intention of being a commercial artist. He saw his dream come true and was able to make a good living out of it. The numerous decorative paintings of his Romanichels, for instance, sold like hot cakes throughout his career, and at high prices.

Another reason why Colin was so successful at the time has to do with a different form of accessibility. He only depicted – and that applies to his whole oeuvre – a positive world, one in which observers might want to live themselves, not the critical and awkward sides of life. These did not match his good-humoured disposition. Various publications of the time do indeed mention a good- natured, blissful person; the same was said, by the way, about his teacher Isidore Verheyden. Colin’s paintings radiated tranquillity and harmony and showed a great deal of “joie de peindre”. I think I may deduce a certain naïveté from that ‘innocent’ art, or at least an unworldly behaviour, more so because we know that he even produced some exceptionally peaceful scenes in the middle of the war (#073, #077, #078…), during which, like it or not, he stuck to reproducing the gentler aspects of life.

During his lifetime, Colin’s works in an impressionistically tinted, realistic style were indeed a formula for success. According to Gaston Heux in Savoir et Beauté, Colin had been ‘spoiled by success’ as early as 1924. However, this type of art, though well-marketable at the time, is out of fashion nowadays and not appreciated by the experienced art lover. Yet it is mainly his unobtrusive works – without specific qualities and of little or no art-historical value – that have circulated within the art market up until now. Therefore, Colin’s standard oeuvre is largely unknown and no longer sought after, certainly not outside the Belgian borders. Because almost everybody is only familiar with his realistic works – including a large number of portraits of Roma and other southern types –, this casts a – totally undeserved – blot on his name among those experienced art lovers.  It is for this reason that, by means of this publication, we want to explicitly demonstrate Colin’s versatility and lift a corner of the veil regarding his ‘hidden masterpieces’. By doing so, everybody will be able to determine what Colin was artistically capable of. Furthermore, we have to admit that in the March 1922 edition of Beauté, Edouard Fonteyne was right when he wrote aboutawarding Colin the Prix de Rome: ‘That was only possible because, in his painting, this highly talented young man has something to offer for everybody. Conservatives will find in his work the métier, the taut and well-placed line. Lovers of colours will see all tints and shades brighten up. And in turn, seekers will discover new rhythms in his work. All of this sums up the importance of Jean Colin’s art which at once convinces; it has both traditional and innovative aspects.’

From the information partly provided to us by Artprice™, the global data base of – among other things – the results of art auctions, we find that as regards sales figures for 2015, Jean Colin was in insignificant 43,799th place. Since 2000, some eighty of his paintings have been sold at auctions, and in these fifteen years the greater part of them ended up in the category between $100 and $500, about a quarter between $500 and $1,000, one fifth between $1,000 and $5,000 and only two over
$5,000. These two paintings (Tricoter à la plage [Knitting on the beach], #078 and Femme à côté d’un piano [Lady beside a piano], #038) are not impressionistically tinted canvases in a realistic style, but rare works with a prevailing impressionistic touch, which we want to discuss in this publication.
In the margin, we should note that we have recalculated Artprice™’s available figures, because some of the auction results for the eponymous French poster designer Jean Colin (1912- 1982) had also crept into the chart of ‘our’ Jean Colin. As a matter of fact, we have noticed that the same confusion about the name also occurs on numerous other websites. Furthermore, we mention that Artprice™’s statistics are obviously limited to the contents of their own data base, but they do give a clear picture of the ratios.
Beside numerous canvases in a realistic style with a limited impressionistic touch which met his patrons’ aesthetic expectations, Jean Colin also made a number of ‘free’ impressionistic works:  for his own pleasure, to push out his boundaries and to give free rein to his artistic desires. After all, he knew that in those days, and certainly within his traditional patronage, such artistic paint- ings were difficult to sell. Sometimes, this could be equally difficult outside conservative circles in Europe during the first quarter of the 20th century. In this respect, we should not forget that in 1905 the prominent French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel 33 had presented an exhibition of no fewer than 315 first-rate canvases by numerous impressionist masters at the Grafton Galleries in London, but he failed to sell a single one of them. Initially, Impressionism was a pioneering aesthetic trend, only comprehensible for art lovers with an experienced eye. Or, to express it once more with a quote from Oscar Wilde: ‘The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public…’

33 During the late 19th and early 20th century, Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922) was a prominent French art dealer, who had developed an extraordinary interest in contemporary art. He played a pioneering role in particularly promoting Impressionist art. His regular artistic circle included – among others – Claude Monet (1840-1926), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and Édouard Manet.

Now and then, Jean Colin was in a financial position which permitted him to paint ‘unsaleable’ canvases just for fun. In this spontaneous impressionistic oeuvre, he mainly depicted subjects with which he had close emotional ties. We are talking about two important categories: paintings featuring his muse Hortensia and a number of scenes and portraits depicting other family members. We already knew to what extent Jean adored his Hortensia and how he portrayed all her charms on canvas – both nude and dressed. Whenever he depicted her – mainly during the 1910s and early 1920s – he would do this in a sketchy manner, as if he had put her on canvas in a matter of seconds, with a lot of attention to atmosphere. Here, the casual touch is much strongerand more daring than in his works in an impressionistically tinted realistic style. All the same, we still speak of a reasoned impressionism, or ‘timid impressionism’ as Van Gogh called it, because Colin did not intend to shock with these works, still wanting to find buyers for them. The fact is that he showed such portraits of Hortensia at commercial exhibitions, although he usually did not succeed in selling them. We know this because he exhibited a large number of these canvases several times, but they were still in his studio awaiting a buyer in 1962 – after his own and his wife Hortensia’s deaths – one example being the pictured masterpiece La Toilette [Getting ready] (#022). As has already been stated, his audience were not ripe for this, nor would they ever be.
They were patrons who purchased art that held no mysteries, not canvases ‘that had not been finished’. They experienced the intense beauty Impressionism could evoke as ugliness. We should not forget that Colin was primarily a portraitist: whoever had a portrait made, expected the image to be reproduced as realistically as possible. Artistic pranks were totally unacceptable, as the results of these would certainly be judged as the picture of a misshapen person. Once a painter has patrons with well-defined tastes, it will obviously prove difficult – though for Colin this was not a necessity – to appeal to a totally different audience.

Colin’s strongly impressionistic works in the second category are those which depict other family members, culminating in the series of beach scenes (see pages 196 to 215). The family regularly made trips to various seaside resorts on the Belgian coast, usually during fine autumn days – as we can tell from their clothes –, for little Susanne’s health. She had a thyroid disorder, and in those days the idea still prevailed that a trip to the seaside during late season was sufficient to maintain good iodine levels. Jean often came along, and he would also combine business with pleasure by immortalizing those family gatherings. Of course, the children were reluctant to pose, although Uncle Jean would reward them with an orange or another snack. Yet, remaining seated or standing still were only snapshots in each case, and Jean had to work as quickly as possible. Because of the combination of the speed required and his emotional involvement, his brushstrokes would be uninhibited, inspired by his immediate perception of the moment. These impromptu paintings, literally created ‘on the spur of the moment’, show – in my opinion – the skill of a great master. And yet, Colin would never exhibit such works. In the more than one hundred exhibition catalogues of which we have made inventories, we found no trace of them. He did indeed make these canvases and panels for his own pleasure and did not object to them remaining in his studio, where he felt sheltered among his loved ones and his beloved brainchildren. Occasionally, he would donate such a beach scene to one of his relatives (#073, for example), but all the other ones we have discovered to the present day were still in the studio after his death. We may therefore regard this important part of Colin’s oeuvre – which took him a number of years to realize – as his private, painted ‘family album’.

Once in a while, Colin would also allow the impressionistic streak to prevail in more detached subjects, albeit to different degrees: in – among other works – still lifes, portraits, townscapes   and rural and domestic scenes. Although I personally do not – with the exception of a few pieces – immediately rank such works by Colin among his gems, we will, for illustrative reasons, show a number of them in this publication. After all, Colin’s mastery is to be found in portraiture or in derivative works depicting people.

From an aesthetic point of view, Colin’s ‘family album’ – expanded by a number of paintings of Hortensia – is still very relevant to our day and age. As regards Impressionism, Colin was obviously not a forerunner, but in his favourite subjects he would translate the contemporary techniques with which he had familiarized himself. After all, all artists are indebted to their predecessors’ experiments and developments. In any case, the Belgian Impressionists were late followers of their French counterparts and gave more structure to their work, as a result of which the impression often came across as more reasoned.

Within his ‘free’ impressionistic exercises, Colin was regularly searching for the ultimate ode to his subject, in the same way that a poet may spend his whole life meditating on the ultimate poem, the ultimate line. As is very typical of Impressionism, Colin usually worked in discontinuous, short brushstrokes, applying thick layers of paint, which from a distance blend in the eye of the beholder. He was guided by feeling and only recorded what he wanted to see. Colin does not present us with a ‘fait accompli’, but shares his personal impressions with us. Consequently, the truth of an impressionistic painting by Jean Colin depends on how he wished to convey the image to us at that particular moment. This led to an undogmatic impression, enabling each spectator to observe each tableau as they please, so that ultimately everybody’s reality turns into what Colin painted.

Jean Colin also manifested himself as a colourist. His studio was a sanctuary of colours. He often used clear, casual hues that were not subject to the limitations of visual reality. Sometimes Colin liberated the colours to such an extent that some of his paintings bear a close affinity to those by the Brabant Fauvists.

The extremely rare works from Colin’s ‘family album’ and a number of impressionistic paintings depicting his muse Hortensia are images of sensations, timeless canvases, worthy of the works of well-known masters from that period. Indeed, such works are a feast for the eye. Look at them as often as you like, you will never grow tired of them.