Étude pour les Champs-Élysées

In 1939 the French state bought a large canvas by Henri Martin called Les Champs-Élysées, the Elysian Fields of ancient myth, and deposited it in the fine arts museum in Bordeaux. Martin was then close to 80, and this smaller canvas is a study for it. As a young man he had painted death as something heavy and theatrical. Here the afterlife is a spring meadow scattered with small flowers. Women in long pale dresses drift through it, some with wreaths in their hair, one carrying an armful of white blossoms. The art historian Claude Juskiewenski read them less as muses than as memories of music and of the children's round dances that turn up in many of his pictures. The tall poplars and the violet hills behind them come from the countryside around Marquayrol, his house near Labastide-du-Vert in the Lot.