Journaux Des Fétichismes

*** What a melancholy sight Bacchus and his four little satyrs make on a cold November day. You can see ice crystals on the grapes so it must be early morning. Imagine the temperature of the lead underneath the gilded plomb doré. Until March, when the women will gather in secret to celebrate the rituals of wine and liberation, the party's over.. The Marsy brothers, Balthazar (c. 1624-1681) and Gaspard (1628-1674) were sculptors employed by King Louis XIV. They created the Fountain of Bacchus for the King's gardens at Versailles, along with the Fountain of Latone, mother of Apollo and Artemis, and the Fountain of Enceladus, the grand trumpeter. If Bacchus was a god of excess, Louis XIV was his fervent acolyte. Fully a third of the cost of the renovations to Versailles was spent on the waterworks to supply its 50 fountains. Thanks to Louis XIV, water is a problem at Versailles to this day.

Autumn Evening, 1895 *** Like other species, artists club together in movements not just for purposes of identification but for longevity. Individuals who don’t belong to schools take longer establishing reputations during their lifetimes, and tend to lose them sooner after their deaths. Henri Le Sidaner (1862–1939) was one such individual: a contemporary of the Post-Impressionists who painted in dots but was not a Pointillist; revelled in complementary colours but was not a Fauve; and drew a veil of dreams over reality but was not a Symbolist, or only briefly. He was, as his friend the critic Gabriel Mourey described him, ‘a sort of mystic who has no faith’. When asked what school he belonged to, his own reply was: ‘None. But if you absolutely insist on categorising me, I am an intimist.’ If you’ve never heard of Le Sidaner, this may be why. But now the artist posthumously dismissed by the great Post-Impressionist scholar John Rewald as a fabricator of ‘post office cale...