Silence intérieur

Carlos Schwabe was born in Germany in 1866 and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, receiving his artistic training at the École des Arts Décoratifs. He moved to Paris in 1890, where he became involved with Symbolist circles, winning favour as an illustrator of mystical religious themes, like his poster for the first Salon de la Rose+Croix in 1892. A prime example of Rosicrucian art, Schwabe’s composition is a pictorial representation of a mystical initiation rite; his finely rendered lithograph in shades of blue represents the ascension of three ethereal women towards spiritual salvation, surrounded by stylized flowers and occult Rosicrucian symbols, and has become a landmark of Symbolism.

Exquisite drawings and watercolours by Schwabe also accompany luxurious editions of texts such as Le Rêve by Emile Zola (published 1892), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1900), Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and other milestones published around those years by Symbolist poets. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolist artists relied heavily on literary and sometimes musical inspiration, and the artists, writers and poets were intricately intertwined: for Schwabe Les fleurs du mal was an important source of imagery but more importantly it defined a state of mind. In his Correspondances, Baudelaire wrote: “Nature is a temple whose living pillars/Breathe forth confused words from time to time,/A forest of symbols where mankind passes through,/Watched by those familiar eyes./Like distant, drawn out echoes intermingling/In a unity that's shadowy, deep,/Vast as the night, broad as daylight,/Sounds, odours, colours echo each other.” (C. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, 1900).

The sleeping waters and mysterious landscape of Silence intérieur seem to evoke the same spiritual ambiguity. The setting is deliberately enigmatic, as if the artist expected the viewer to be disquieted by a scene that suggests, at the same time, tranquillity and anxiety, day and night, abyss and shallow waters. Immersed in a silent melancholy, the draped woman turns the pages of a book, a clear allusion to poetry as a source of inspiration but also the place where the secret of the unconscious remains undisclosed to the viewer. The startled, inquisitive eye of the nocturnal bird, in direct contrast to the woman’s meditative pose, adds to the unsettling atmosphere of the scene. (see: J.-D. Jumeau-Lafond, Carlos Schwabe, Symboliste et visionnaire, Paris, 1994, p. 134).

Executed by Schwabe in 1908, the present lot brings together all the artist’s major sources of inspiration: the masterful attention to botanical detail and desire for precision can be compared to the earlier work of the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as Dürer’s firmness and meticulous process, while the idealised feminine figure and her literary symbolism echoe Botticeli’s supple elegance and the iconography of the Renaissance. As a result, Silence intérieur can be considered one of the artist’s finest pastels, whose large format adds to its strong expressive power.