Henri Beau

Henri Beau (; né Louis-Henri Beau; 27June 186315May 1949) was a French-Canadian Impressionist painter. He is noted for Chemin en été, La dispersion des Acadiens, L'arrivée de Champlain à Québec, and Les Noces de Cana. Beau is a largely forgotten artist due to his long absence from Canada. His widow Marie Beau worked towards establishing his reputation as an artist in Canada after his death. He was only recognized as a notable artist decades later, with major retrospectives of his paintings celebrating his career by the Galerie Bernard Desroches in Montréal in 1974, and at the Musée du Québec (now Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec) in Québec City in 1987. He obtained art commissions from the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montréal and the Government of Quebec.

Biography Birth and childhood Henri Beau was born Louis-Henri Beau to a working class French-Canadian family in Montréal, in 1863. He was the third child of restaurateur Charles-Arsène Beau and Marguerite-Clémentine Hupé. He had seven brothers and three sisters. His father met and married his mother, Marguerite-Clémentine Hupé, a 21-year-old Montréal woman sometime before 1851. They moved to Montréal in 1858. That union produced eleven children, including Arthur, Louis-Henri, Joseph-Vincent, Charles and Paul; but few records exist of the names of the other children. The surname "Beau" might be attributed as Le Beau. His brother Paul Beau (1871–1949) was a fine arts ironworker. Later Beau produced a décanteur à trépied (decanter tripod) as an homage to his brother.

Art education Chemin en Été (Path in Summer), Beau 1895. Early Impressionist landscape painted while he was a student in Paris. In 1881, he studied under Abbé Joseph Chabert who taught academic art at the Institut National des Beaux-Arts, Sciences, Arts et Métiers et Industrie (1871–1887), an establishment founded by Chabert and benefactors such as industrialist Jean-Baptiste Prat. Marie Chantal Leblanc, then a graduate student under art historian and professor Laurier Lacroix at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), notes in her mémoire that under Chabert, Beau most likely encountered and interacted with Joseph-Charles Franchère, Ludger Larose and Charles Gill at some point, as all are listed as students in the Nordheimer classroom between 1885 and 1888. In 1884, he travelled to the United States, where he coloured woodcuts in San Francisco. He then travelled to Paris to continue his education at studios there. He began presenting his work at exhibitions in Paris in the 1890s.

Beau's presence in Paris is mentioned in the 21June 1888 edition of the journal Paris-Canada, founded in the year 1884 to promote Franco-Canadian relations. He studied under William-Adolphe Bouguereau at l'Académie Julian and Jean-Léon Gérôme at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris known today as l'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Gérôme encouraged his pupils to be independent and used his influence to help them gain admittance to the Salon in Paris. Unlike many of his Canadian peers who pursued an art education in Paris, Beau's family was not wealthy so he used his talents as a painter to earn a living. He is known to have copied eleven paintings from the Louvre in 1896 and 1900. According to a letter by Beau's wife (held in the archives of the MBNAQ) to Paul Rainville, then curator of the Musée de la Province de Québec (MBNAQ), Beau also attended l'Académie Colarossi. It is also mentioned that he studied with Léon Bonnat and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes who advised Beau to pursue landscape painting.

Art career Early career In 1893, Beau received a commission from Alfred-Léon Senneterre to paint Les Noces de Cana, depicting the marriage at Cana, delivered to the Notre-Dame du Sacré-Coeur Chapel in the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal in 1894. He received $500.00 (around $13,590) in 2016 dollars) according to a document held in the parish archives. The painting was destroyed on 7 December 1978, when a fire ravaged the chapel.

As Beau's family background was that of a working-class family living in a boarding house, patronage from Senneterre allowed him to pursue an art education in Paris. Especially after his father's death in 1894, finishing his studies in Paris would only have been possible with the help of patrons. According to an article in Canadian Art by Evan H. Turner, few Montrealers were interested in Impressionist paintings. One notable early and first collector of French Impressionist art was Sir William Cornelius Van Horne. It is documented that Van Horne sat on the Art Association of Montreal Gallery Committee and involved himself personally in the Canadian Pacific Railway's art acquisition program. He was a known patron of Parisian-trained Impressionist painters, and his painting collection contained works by nearly all of the early Impressionist painters of his time.

In 1902, Beau received a commission from the Government of Québec for L'arrivée de Champlain à Québec for the Legislative Council of Quebec, delivered in 1903, for which he was paid $1,300 (around $27,500) in 2016 dollars). It was criticized for historical inaccuracies. In 1909, he proposed producing a larger painting depicting the first session of the Legislative Assembly of Quebec in 1792. This was deferred for administrative reasons and the project was assigned subsequently to Charles Huot in 1910. In July 1904, Beau returned to Montréal and worked as an art professor at l'école Sarsfield from September 1905 to April 1906.

Memberships Beau was a member of various art societies in France, including the Société des Uns and the Parisian Société de Salon d'Hiver. He left her around that time for Marie Fertinel an opera singer with whom he had an affair and later married in 1946. Beau died on 15May 1949 in Paris. He is buried at the cimetière de Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine).

During his time at the Public Archives of Canada, Beau's works were more structured. During his personal time, he painted Impressionist landscapes. His paintings in his final years, from 1939 to 1949, were of the Jaujac region in Ardèche in southern France.

Legacy After his death, his widow Marie Beau and a few of his friends wished to honour his memory by establishing his reputation as an artist. They tried to interest the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée du Quebec in acquiring more of his works. Fonds Henri Beau, Galeries Bernard Desroches

Permanent displays Femme à l'ombrelle painted in 1897, which appears in the catalogue raisonné of Pierre L'Allier and A.K. Prakash is exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. It was acquired in 1986 and it is exhibited in their Québecois and Canadian arts collection.

List of known artworks

The following is an incomplete list of Beau's artworks. Those listed here are known to have appeared in a catalogue raisonné or other sources.

Portrait of a Woman, 1891 Les noces de Cana, 1894 Chemin en été, 1895 Summer in the Garden, 1895 Winter, 1895 En Provence, 1897 Femme à l'ombrelle, 1897 La Dispertion des Acadiens, 1900 Atelier de l'artiste, c.1924–1925 Lady in the Forest, c. 1915 Woman Reading, c. 1920 View of Honfleur, 1925

Record sale prices At the Cowley-Abbott Auction titled An Important Private Collection - Part II, June 8th 2023, lot #145, Summer in the Garden (1895), oil on canvas, 15 x 18 ins ( 38.1 x 45.7 cms ), Auction Estimate: $5,000.00 - $7,000.00, realized a price of $60,000.00.