Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Paul-Louis Delance
French; 19th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism)
50%
Sketch for the office of the prefect of the Hotel de Ville: The Famine. 1889. Oil on canvas
Presumably this sketch was made in preparation for a larger in-situ painting, which would explain away that weird gray rectangle that juts into the scene: it's just approximating some architectural feature. Shame, since that one passage of interruption is the only interesting thing in this painting. The picture's brushy facture doesn't amount to much (and besides, it's a sketch), nor do the large chunks of empty space between the figure groups, which aren't sufficiently activated either by the way they've been painted or by what's around them. But damn, that rectangle: it's almost integrated with the scene, but it's just a little too far to the left to be filling in the gap between the large and the small group, and a little too far to the right to be obscuring the crowd. It just looms over the scene, like a bomb or an illness. It would be giving Delance way too much credit to say that it's some kind of pictorial innovation, but you also have to wonder how deliberately aesthetic it is — after all, the painting has been brought to some degree of completion. It's a memorable painting, if not a good one. (TFS, 2026)