Aman-Jean

This elegant, introspective portrait of French architect Alfred- Ernest Lasneret was painted by Edmond Aman-Jean, pseudonym of Amand Edmond Jean, a painter, engraver and art critic who trained in Henri Lehmann’s studio, where he met Georges Seurat, Alphonse Osbert and Alexandre Séon. All were fascinated by the art of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Together with Seurat, Aman-Jean participated in the staircase décor at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, Le Bois sacré cher aux arts et aux muses [The Sacred Wood, Dear to the Arts and to the Muses] (1884, in situ) considered one of Puvis de Chavannes’ most exceptional murals, along with the decor for the Panthéon in Paris and the grand amphitheater at the Sorbonne. A close friend of Verlaine’s, Aman-Jean painted his portrait while the poet, ill with syphilis and alcoholism, but still at the height of his fame, was staying at the Hôpital Broussais. This portrait is now in the Musée de la Cour d’Or in Metz, the birthplace of the “Prince of Poets”.

A close friend of writer and art critic Joséphin Péladan, Aman-Jean exhibited at the first two salons of the Rose-croix esthétique. In 1899, he joined the Société nouvelle de peintres et de sculpteurs founded by Gabriel Mourey, alongside Charles Cottet, Henri Le Sidaner, René Ménard, Frits Thaulow and Henri Martin, among other artists with whom he shared the same aesthetic sense. Around 1900, he became close to the artists of the Bande Noire: Cottet and Ménard, but also André Dauchez, René Xavier Prinet and Lucien Simon, who advocated the use of dark colors to express the melancholy of reality, in reaction to the light colors of the Postimpressionists.

An intellectual artist and art critic, Aman-Jean took a keen interest in the artistic theories of his time, from Synthetism to Divisionism. His corpus, however, is fairly homogeneous, and is composed in a large majority of portraits of dreamy, languid women. His portraits of men are rare, and reflect a special relationship with the sitter. This elegant portrait shows the architect Alfred Lasneret, dressed in a dark suit, standing with his left hand nonchalantly slipped into his pocket. In the lower left-hand corner, rolled sheets of paper probably evoke his plans and drawn projects.

Born on April 18, 1863 in Sézanne (Marne) and dying in 1932, Alfred Lasneret trained at the École nationale des arts décoratifs, where he was a pupil of Hippolyte Duttenhofer and Jean Louis Pascal, before continuing his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, from 1888 to 1892. He first set up his agency in Paris, then in Esbly (Seine-et-Marne). He was responsible for a number of buildings, including a tenement building at 26 rue de Chartres in Neuilly. The framed drawing in the background recalls that the architect was also a draughtsman in his spare time, and sometimes exhibited at the Salon; for example, the two views shown in 1896, one depicting the Ponte Vecchio in Florence and the other the Oratory of San Bernardino in Perugia.