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©
Louis Valtat
Louis Valtat

Skaters in Winter (The Garden of the Petit Trianón in Versailles) (?)

ca. 1900
Oil on canvas.
81.3 x 99.7 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.2000.63
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
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Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop

From the details kindly given by Louis-André Valtat, the artist's grandson, who is preparing a new edition of the annotated catalogue of Valtat's works, this painting was executed around 1900. The place represented here, a public garden covered in snow where an ice-skating rink has been created, could be the garden of the Petit Trianon in Versailles. According to the plans, Valtat might have chosen the view from a point just left of the small bridge leading to the Temple of Love, on the side of the Saint Antoine alley. The poplars have gone, but the river is still there, and follows the same winding course. Beyond it, the side wall of the Petit Trianon is clearly visible. The artist, whose family had been living in Versailles since 1880, had grown up not far from this historical garden, which is still today one of the places the inhabitants of Versailles like best to go for a stroll.

Many years before, in 1868, Renoir had painted Skating in the Bois de Boulogne (private collection), with a similar composition in its broad lines to that of Valtat. The latter might have seen Renoir's work at Ambroise Vollard's, their common dealer, unless he had only seen its photographic reproduction, as at the time Vollard was gathering the necessary documents to draw up an annotated catalogue of Renoir's works. But this painting shows Valtat's originality and undeniable sense of humour. In the foreground, the fowl-geese and ducks-are reduced to schematic outlines, almost caricatures. The birds, quietly settled along the bank, are aligned like the audience of a show, and seem to be the main subject of the composition. The artist has placed in the background the small, dark, quickly sketched silhouettes of the skaters going round in circles on the patch of ice allocated to them, and the foreshortening perspective chosen by the painter gives them the aspect of insects, tiny compared with the geese.

The marked, elaborate and varied touch, with some unexpected brightly coloured spots, reveals the artist's pre-Fauvist temperament. The composition is organised in two main areas with contrasting colour ranges: in the foreground, cold shades; in the background, warm colours. The representation of the snow is particularly remarkable, and the beautiful orchestration of whites, heightened with touches of blue, grey and pink, makes this work comparable to Monet's snowy landscapes. The water is slate blue, the poplars are depicted like flames with reddish shades which warm up the colour, so precisely rendered, of a snowy sky, grey and heavy, with undefined shades.

This almost tactile application of the colour of the sky, where the artist mixes pinks, mauves, lilac, blues, greys, whites and even some touches of red, shows an indisputable predilection for colour. The covered-up shadows, the simplification of the composition and of the perspective, contribute to the modernity of this landscape, representative of the artist's production at the turn of the century.

Marina Ferretti
 

20th Century19th Century - French paintingPaintingOilcanvas
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Skaters in Winter (The Garden of the Petit Trianón in Versailles) (?). Patinadores en invierno (El jardín del Pequeño Trianón en Versalles) (?), c. 1900
Skaters in Winter (The Garden of the Petit Trianón in Versailles) (?)
Louis Valtat

©

Louis Valtat

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Skaters in Winter (The Garden of the Petit Trianón in Versailles) (?). Patinadores en invierno (El jardín del Pequeño Trianón en Versalles) (?), c. 1900
Skaters in Winter (The Garden of the Petit Trianón in Versailles) (?)
Louis Valtat

©

Louis Valtat

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