“Evening on the Marne, 1917”

Oil on Canvas

27 x 36 inches unframed

38 x 46.5 inches framed

Signed lower right

Framed in a period hand carved frame.

 

Provenance:

The Estate of Dr and Mrs.William J Gies  (1872 –1956)

Estate of William J Gies II (2024)

Exhibition Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara Ca. The Summer Salon, 2022. The Fall Salon, 2019

 

This 1917 landscape depicts the River Marne. The Marne is a river in France, an eastern tributary of the Seine in the area east and southeast of Paris. This painting captures the soft light as the moon rises, and the warm sun as it sets to the west.   All the trees glow with the distant sunlight, leaving only shimmers on the river.  In the darkness, two boats sit silently with lantern light reflecting in the water.

 

For Dabo, 1917 was a pivotal year.  In the first quarter of the year, Dabo participated in four group shows and a major solo exhibition, featuring 26 canvases, at the prestigious Goupil Gallery in New York.  The Goupil exhibition garnered positive reviews everywhere, including in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Tribune, New York Herald and New York Times.   The review in the Eagle was consistent with the others: “This well-known Brooklyn artist has added a sharp poignancy to his other gifts of interpretation.  He departs from the path of detail in all his new paintings.  And in its place, he gives us rich colorful subtlety.”  Dabo was at the top of his game.  The exhibit closed on March 31, 1917.  A few days later, on April 6th, the U.S. declared war on Germany and entered the fray.   By the end of May, General Pershing was landing troops in France.

 

During World War I, the multilingual Dabo went to France and offered his services to Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. He ended up serving as an officer in the French and British Armies successfully and exposed several German spies, using his ear for dialect and accent. He even played the role of spy once, going behind German lines to gain information. For the U.S., he was part of a commission that investigated alleged atrocities that happened in France during the war and reported that they were indeed true. He was commissioned as a captain in the United States Army and served as an interpreter for the American Expeditionary Force as well as an aide-de-camp to Major General Mark L. Hersey of the 4th Infantry Division.

While in Europe he continued to paint dramatic landscapes, capturing incredible visions of war and the effects of war in the landscapes. Five of these important works were published in a military book titled “The Fourth Division” by Christian A. Bach in 1920.

Biography:

Leon Dabo (1864-1960)

Painter, muralist and lithographer, a distinguished artist known to museums, curators and collectors worldwide.  An American artist born in France, Dabo’s active career in art extended over a period of 80 years.  He painted both in New York and France between the two world wars.  He studied with some of the most influential painters of his day, John La Farge, Puvis de Chavannes, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Dabo’s first teacher in New York City was John La Farge [1835-1910] where he followed La Farge’s artistic philosophy, that art should embody “more than a mere representation of external appearances,” that views of nature should transcend the physical and appeal to ones emotion. La Farge is also credited with Dabo’s introduction to flower painting.

In his early years in Paris, Dabo was a protégé of the renowned painter and muralist Puvis de Chavannes [1824-1898] many of his early landscapes owe much to his mentor in muted tonality, and evoking a dreamy quiet mood.  In 1888 Dabo settled in London where he associated with such artistic personalities as James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert, George Bernard Shaw, Alvin Langdon Coburn, among others.  But it was James McNeill Whistler [1834-1903] who had a profound and lasting influence on Dabo’s art.  He closely followed Whistler’s theory of “Art for Art’s sake,” showing the close relationship between the soft, tonal quality of color with the careful placement of composition into decorative and harmonious elements.

Dabo was involved with and participated in two of the major events in the American Art scene; the Independents of 1910, and the Armory Show of 1913.  His travels abroad between 1917-1920 as a member of the American financial Mission to the Allies, allowed him to meet other important artist’s of the day, and to study their work.

Dabo was commissioned by the Army’s Fourth Division under Major General Mark L. Hersey to execute five paintings depicting landscapes of historic sites during the first World War.  Dabo continued to paint and exhibit in this country and Europe until his death in 1960, where he strove to realize new color sensations, mastering his use of light, texture and atmosphere.

His works are owned by over forty museums in this country and abroad, among them:

The National Museum of American Art Washington D.C. Evening on the Hudson

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloud, New York Harbor from the Jersey Shore, Marine

Musee D’Orsay, Paris, France Moore Park

The Musee de Lourve, Paris, France, Citadel

During his life he was awarded the Cross of Knight of the French Legion of Honor for his contribution to art.  He was a member of the National Academy of Design New York; Societe National des Beaux Arts, Paris; Societe des Amis des Arts, Versailles; Allied Artists Association, London; President of The Pastellists, New York; The New York Historical Society; Four Arts Society, New York; University Club, Paris; Association of Italian Artists, Florence, Italy; and a Life Member of the National Arts Club, New York.

Dr Kevin Avery, associate curator in the department of American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote in a museum catalogue in 1999:

“No landscape painter associated with Tonalism aligned himself so unmistakeably and consistently with Whistler than did Leon Dabo.”

The New York Times in it’s review of his Floral Etudes, drawings, and Pastels at M. Knoedler Company, New York City in 1933, wrote:

“A distinct contribution to be associated with the flower harmonies of Odilon Redon and of Fantin-Latour.”