Portrait de Henri Harpignies

Henri Harpignies was a celebrated French landscape painter associated with the Barbizon tradition, known as 'the Michelangelo of trees' for his powerful treatment of arboreal forms. By 1878, when Bonnat painted this portrait, Harpignies was in his mid-fifties and well established — he would later receive the Legion of Honor and live to nearly ninety-nine. The portrait of a colleague offers a contrast to Bonnat's official commissions: the informality of one artist painting another, the candor possible when the sitter's visual intelligence equals the painter's. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes holds the portrait — Harpignies was born in Valenciennes, making the museum's acquisition of a portrait of their most distinguished native son an entirely natural outcome of that civic connection.

Oil on canvas with the directness and slightly loosened handling that Bonnat permitted himself when painting fellow artists. The face of a man of active outdoor temperament — weathered, alert — is treated with the same seriousness as any commissioned sitter.