Gijs Bosch Reitz
"Garden of Versailles"
Sold
GIJS BOSCH REITZ
Amsterdam 1860-1938
GARDEN OF VERSAILLES
Oil on canvas
78 x 102 cm.
Signed: bottom left 'Bosch Reitz'
Provenance: Private collection, The Netherlands; Six collection, The Netherlands.
Exhibited: Laren, Singer Museum, Geschilderde Tuinen, 5 June - 26 August 2019
Literature: A. van Lienden, Geschilderde tuinen, Zwolle 2018, p. 44
Between 1902 and 1906 he always spent six months in Versailles to paint; he spent the other half of the year in his studio in St. Ives. In Versailles he painted the gardens of the palace in a sunny, yellow-green palette and a loose touch, as if painting in France breathed new life into the impressionist style. Bosch Reitz also painted figures, such as in open-air concerts, but most of the attention went to the gardens themselves, with the old fountains, balustrades and hedges. His work from Versailles and nearby Trianon was exhibited at Kunsthandel Oldenzeel in Rotterdam in 1906 and the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant wrote: "This place of lonely opulence, of frozen splendor that remained; the two-hundred-year-old stiffness of construction, enchanted, lulled by spring or summer, tempered by the melancholy of autumn, has attracted the wanderer, who apparently is an aristocrat ... ". Bosch Reitz was called the "painter of the aristocratic landscape" and praised for expressing the feeling of loneliness and sadness he had in his distinguished paintings.