Henri Martin

Henri Jean Guillaume Martin was born on August 5, 1860 in Toulouse, at 127 Grande-Rue Saint-Michel, to Auguste Jean François Martin (cabinetmaker) and Marie Victoire Massé (housewife).

Henri Martin completed his apprenticeship at the School of Fine Arts in his hometown from 1877 to 1879, in the studio of Jules Garipuy. Equipped with a municipal scholarship, he left in 1879 for Paris where he became a student of Jean-Paul Laurens. On August 16, 1881, in Toulouse he married Marie Charlotte Barbaroux, a pastellist he met at the Beaux-Arts in this city. From their union were born four sons, two of whom became landscape and portrait painters: René Jean, who signed his works Claude-René Martin (born in Paris 14th on June 15, 1885) and Jacques Auguste known as Jac(ques) Martin-Ferrières (born in Saint-Paul-Cap-de-Joux in Tarn on August 6, 1893). Henri Martin himself had the painter Henri Doucet as a student and collaborator.

In 1885, he traveled through Italy and studied primitives there in the company of Edmond Aman-Jean and Ernest Laurent. This trip marks a turning point in his art and directs the artist towards poetic inspiration. His technique moves away from academic models, in favor of an original divisionism which reveals the influence of the neo-impressionists but in a more spontaneous than theorized way: short, separate and parallel touches construct the shapes and the light, in an idealized chromaticism conducive to dreams.

Reader of Poe, Dante, Byron, Baudelaire and Verlaine (he subscribed to the Intimate Liturgies published by the magazine Le Saint-Graal in 1892), Henri Martin exhibited works with symbolist themes, such as Each one his chimera from 1891 or Vers l the abyss of 1897; and misty landscapes populated by melancholy and timeless figures.

In 1892 he participated in Joséphin Peladan's Rose-Croix aesthetic salons. He honored public commissions, adorning in turn the Capitol of Toulouse, the Lot prefecture in Cahors, the Sorbonne in 1908, the Town Hall of Paris, a cabinet of the Élysée in 1908, the Council of State in 1914-1922, the town hall of the 5th arrondissement in 1935.

Henri Martin, while moving away from symbolist themes, will always keep the mysterious poetry of the attitudes, the secret and diffuse atmosphere of the landscapes and a certain spiritualization of the forms bathed in the serenity of traditional figures, of allegory. His deep nature leads him towards a peaceful expression of an idealized world in pointillism with enlarged touches.

In June 1899, he joined the New Society of Painters and Sculptors, with a first collective exhibition at the Georges Petit gallery in Paris in March 1900.

He set up his workshop in Labastide-du-Vert in the Lot, where he ended his days.

In 1896, he obtained the Knight's Cross of the Legion of Honor and was appointed officer in 1905 then commander in 1914. On November 24, 1917 he was elected full member of the Academy of Fine Arts, painting section, in the chair by Gabriel Ferrier.

The Cahors Henri-Martin museum preserves numerous works by the painter.