Evening Harmony on the Sea

In 1930 Alphonse Osbert was in his seventies. Cubism was two decades old and the Surrealists were active in Paris, yet the small panel he showed at the Salon that spring still belongs to the Symbolist 1890s. A young woman in a saffron robe sits barefoot on a dark ledge of rock above a calm sea. She plays a lyre and lifts her face toward the evening sky, while the sun sinks into haze on the horizon and thin bands of blue light lie across the water. Nothing in it tells a story. As the title says, it is a harmony. Osbert kept a charcoal drawing of the same composition in his studio until he died. Both came to the state through a bequest from his daughter Yolande, the painting to the Musée d'Orsay and the drawing to the Louvre's department of graphic arts.