Berger et ses trois muses

By 1900, when this was painted, Henri Martin had already been scolded by Joséphin Péladan, the self-styled Sâr who ran the Rose+Croix salons for idealist art in Paris. Péladan approved of Martin's subjects, poets and muses and visions, but not of his brushwork. In 1895 he mocked one of his pictures as a Dante painted in dots and called the method ugly. Martin kept both. Here the subject is a pure idyll, a shepherd piping to his flock while three muses in white drift across a pale pink sky, one of them holding a golden lyre. Everything is built from short, broken touches of colour, the rosy hills, the blue shadow along the slope, the blossom on the thin tree at the right. In these years the white-robed muses kept returning in his pictures, floating over spring landscapes as an image of the Golden Age sung by Virgil. The painting once belonged to the collector Paul Riff and entered the Cahors museum in 2012.