Trois Églises et Trois Primitifs

Huysmans’s literary vocation grew out of his frequent visits to museums. His first art review, “Les Paysagistes contemporains,” was written after he visited the 1867 Exposition Universelle. Alongside his novels, he built up over the course of his life a vast body of art criticism ranging from the Primitives to modern art. The theme of the Primitives, which occupied him especially toward the end of his life, appears in three texts brought together here in one volume. Published in 1905, this collection is the last of its kind and probably the most valuable, since Huysmans had by then distanced himself from the constraints of the genre and gave free rein to his personal interpretation. He set out his method — that of a true art critic, in his view — in a preface written for Abbé Broussolle’s “La Jeunesse du Pérugin”: “For me, the only art criticism worth admiring must be understood as follows: one must summarize the painter’s biography and the origins of his art […] then define his talent […] above all describe the painting in such a way that whoever reads the written account of it can see it […]. This can only be achieved if the person undertaking the task is at once an auctioneer, a scholar and, above all, an artist.”

A choice copy, no. 1, for Léon Leclaire, dear to Huysmans’s heart: in 1901 he had dedicated his Sainte-Lydwine “à M. et Mme Léon Leclaire, amis et compagnons de Schiedam et de Ligugé.”

From the libraries of Dr. André Chauveau (II, 1976, no. 224) and André Merlin (2022, no. 200).