Alexandre Séon started his artistic training at the age of fifteen, when he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyons. When he joined the studio of Henri Lehmann in Paris in 1877, the encounters with Georges Seurat, Alphonse Osbert and Puvis de Chavannes were cause to change the course of his career. At the Salon of 1879, he exhibited drawings while at the Salon in 1881, he contributed two paintings. Shortly afterwards he became the student of Puvis de Chavanne, with whom he collaborated for the next ten years. Séon would continue to exhibit at the Paris Salons up to 1890. Together with Joséphin Péladan and the Comte de La Rochefoucault, Séon was one of the founders of the Salon de la Rose+Croix and would participate in all six Salons during the 1890s.

Séon contributed nineteen works at the first Salon de la Rose+Croix in 1892. Many artists at the Salon drew upon the stimulation of sense other than the visual, particularly the olfactory.[1] In Séon’s Perfume of Flowers, illustrated in the first Salon catalogue and showing a similar composition to our study, the fragrance of flowers is wafting into the air, like hot air rising, with angels floating with chalices, evoking the Rosicrucian belief in emanation of the soul. The eighteen other exhibits by Séon at the Rose+Croix sought to convey cross-gendered subjectivity through androgyny, inspired by Péladan, who had feminized his first name after all.

In the present drawing, the hovering angels are now holding lutes, symbols of poetry, animating the forest in a hypnotic rhythm, amplified by the alternating colors of blue and white trees. It is a study for the painting Sous Bois, le soir, first exhibited at the Salon de la Société nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1984.[2] Although no color image of the painting exists, a period review reveals that the trees are green gold:

« (..)Le soir, où l’âme dorienne de Séon fait planer, dans l’intervalle mystérieusement rigide et nimbé d’or vert des ramures, de grandes muses pâles sans geste et sans voix, immobiles et muettes comme de grands oiseaux: de l’art décoratif en puissance. Les tendances élevées sont partout encore si rares qu’il faut saluer leur essaim blanc qui passe. »[3]

Like Seurat, Séon was engaged in evolving a theory of color symbolism or divisionism, the characteristic style in neo-impressionism defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches that interact.[4] Séon’s works show a subtle use of chromoluminarism. Rather than mixing pigments, the viewer is required to combine colors optically. Though Séon was distrustful of systems, he did adopt certain practices, as for example what he called ‘a degradations perspective du ton’: the reduction in size of the brushstroke to denote spatial recession. He also sought a way of using colors and lines to symbolize physical or spiritual states and abstract ideas. Each color had a meaning: white for purity, orange for sadness, violet and blue for melancholy, while horizontal lines stood for serenity and vertical ones for spiritual evolution.[5]

Study for In the Woods is a perfect application of Séon’s ideas: the impression of melancholy of the faceless angels floating through the forest is conveyed by the dominance of the vertical lines of the thin trees illustrating the artists theories on the symbolism of lines. The unnatural colors of blue and yellow apply divisionism by referencing the true colors of trees, forest vegetation, and sky.

[2] No. 1048, ill. 38

[3] Raymond Bouyer, “L’Art et la vie au Salon du Champ de mars”, in: L’Artiste, 1894, I, pp. 414-5: “(..) The evening, the Dorian spirit of Séon hovers, in a mysteriously rigid twilight surrounded by green gold branches, large pale muses without gesture and without voice, motionless and mute like large birds: decorative art in all its might. The ascent is still so rare that we must salute its white swarm that passes.”

[4] A. Bowness, a.o., French Symbolist Painters. Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon and their followers, London 1972, p. 145

[5] Alexandre Séon (1885-1917). La Beauté idéale, exh.cat. 2015, pp. 40-41