“You may be able to photograph a landscape […] but not the ideas I have in my mind. We will produce paintings that do not imitate nature.”

Francis Picabia’s image is so closely bound up with Dada that it is hard to imagine him starting out as a child prodigy of late Impressionism.¹ Born into a middle-class Parisian family with a French mother and a Spanish father born in Cuba, Picabia was in contact with the world of art from his childhood on. The family collected paintings and his maternal grandfather Louis-Alphonse Davanne, a graduate in chemistry, developed a passion for photography, set up a photographic laboratory and acquired a certain reputation in this field.² 

While there is little reliable information about how Picabia learned his trade, there are at least a couple of somewhat contradictory stories that he himself spread at a later stage in his career. The first, which began to circulate in the 1920s, is the myth that he started out as a forger: “When I was young, I copied the paintings my father owned. I sold the original paintings and replaced them with copies. Nobody realised what had happened. That’s how I discovered my calling.”³ In the second, he instead champions the unique qualities of painting in an argument with his grandfather: “You may be able to photograph a landscape […] but not the ideas I have in my mind. We will produce paintings that do not imitate nature.”⁴ 

It is possible to interpret the initial phase of the painter’s activity precisely on the basis of these antithetical myths. Solid academic training at the École des arts décoratifs and under the guidance of Fernand-Anne Cormon and Ferdinand Humbert did not prevent him from taking part not only in the traditional Salon des artistes français but also in the more avantgarde Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants. In just over a decade, between 1899 and 1910, the young artist of gargantuan appetite imbibed the history of French art over the previous century, from the Barbizon school through the legendary years of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism all the way to Symbolism and the Fauvism of Henri Matisse and André Derain. 

Commercial success did not take long to arrive. His first solo show of sixtyone works was held in 1905 by Gustave Danthon, the owner of the illustrious Parisian art gallery on Boulevard Haussmann, with a preface by the influential critic Léon Roger-Milès in the catalogue. While noting similarities with the works of Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, the reviews of the young Impressionist’s paintings in the press were positive. According to Louis Vauxcelles, Picabia displayed a singular technique, the reflection of an original temperament, unlike so many dishonest plagiarists.⁵ The same peculiarity of character, combined with uncommon stubbornness and an inclination to inite the masses, was noted in the same period by the writer and painter Marie de La Hire in her novel Modèle nu (1908), in which Picabia appears under the name of Luis Péréga.⁶ Success therefore smiled upon him despite the fact that his works mimicked Pissarro and Sisley all too blatantly, so much so indeed that they can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, as looking forward to the open subversion of the concepts of originality, citation and homage in his later Dadaist period (cat. p. 672). Picabia revisited the same places as Sisley - Moret-sur-Loing (cat. p. 600), Villeneuve-sur-Yonne and Montigny - three decades later and set up his easel in exactly the same spots as his predecessor. Far from confining himself to atmosphere, however, he interpreted reality in the light of the images of it accumulated in the meantime, not through the “innocent” eye of the painter en plein air but rather through the vibrant texture of Sisley’s brushstrokes and the iconic quality of picture postcards, which were becoming popular in that very period.⁷ And the anything but indulgent comment of the old Impressionist Pissarro, whose sons were close friends of Picabia, again focuses attention on the controversial practice of using photographs: 

“This young person is extraordinary. He produces a whole quantity of academic studies from life, paying no attention to the air or to light, and paints everything the same shade of brown! In the South of France! When he has finished a good number of drawings, he begins his painting for the Salon, a canvas of two metres, after preparing the general subject by means of photography.”⁸ 

The painting in the Cerruti Collection bears important witness to the troubled beginning of the artist’s career and his congenital contradictions. Auctioned at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1955, the work reappeared on the Parisian art market in the early 1990s before being bought by Francesco Federico Cerruti in London in 2004. Published erroneously by Maria Lluïsa Borràs as Ziem’s house at Les Martigues,⁹ it was auctioned by Sotheby’s with the more descriptive title Ferme à la petite mare. This is, however, rejected by William Camfield in his general catalogue of the artist, where is it listed as Untitled. 

Fabio Cafagna 

¹ Camfield 1979, p. 8. 

² Camfield et al. 2014, pp. 37-40. 

³ “J’ai copié, étant jeune, les tableaux de mon père. J’ai vendu les tableaux originaux et les ai remplacés par les copies. Personne ne s’en étant aperçu, je me suis découvert une vocation” (in Arnauld 2002, p. 13). 

⁴ “Tu peux photographier un paysage, […] mais non les idées que j’ai dans la tête. Nous ferons des tableaux qui n’imiteront pas la nature” (in Arnauld 2002, p. 19). 

⁵ Camfield et al. 2014, pp. 48-49. 

⁶ Arnauld 2002, pp. 30-35. 

⁷ Ibid., pp. 51ff. 

⁸ Turin 1974-75, p. 32. 

⁹ Contrary to the information given in Borràs 1985, p. 56, note 14, the work did not appear in the show at the Galerie Haussmann, Paris, in February 1907 (see the online catalogue: https://archive.org/details/ picabia00pica/page/n47). Félix Ziem, whose name appears in the title, was a known painter of landscapes in the style of the Barbizon school. Ziem was admired by Picabia, above all in his early years, and a friend of his maternal uncle Maurice Davanne.