Henri Le Sidaner

Born 1862 in Port Louis (Mauritius)
Died 1939 in Paris

Le Sidaner’s style, informed by late Impressionism and Symbolism, emerged in numerous paintings of his garden in Gerberoy. To this day, the village still celebrates the “Fête des Roses” founded by the artist.

Le Sidaner was born on the island of Mauritius and grew up in the port city of Dunkirk, where he received his earliest artistic training. From 1882 on he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and there explored Impressionist painting technique. In 1885 he moved to the north of France, where an artists’ colony had been founded in the coastal town of Étaples; in 1898 he went to Versailles and painted the palace gardens.

He first visited the medieval village of Gerberoy in 1901 and shortly thereafter acquired a house there. Like Monet, he planted a garden where he could cultivate nature according to his own conceptions. Le Sidaner also encouraged the local inhabitants to plant roses throughout the entire village. From then on, his work was characterized above all by garden pictures with Symbolist overtones.

Le Sidaner in the collection

Le Sidaner is represented with one work in the Hasso Plattner Collection, on view in the Museum Barberini as a permanent loan from the Hasso Plattner Foundation. With over 110 paintings of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, including masterpieces by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Gustave Caillebotte, and Paul Signac, the museum in Potsdam is one of the most important centers of Impressionist landscape painting in the world.