There’s no need for me to tell you about Henri Doucet’s painting: you’ll see, you’ll either like it or you won’t; an analysis of the play we’re about to hear is quite superfluous; an analysis of the painting we’re about to see is even more so.
I believe you can’t separate the man from the work; it’s embarrassing to discover that one is at odds with the other, even if the disagreement is only apparent.
Doucet is a sensitive rather than a sensual person; his eyes soften as much as they enjoy, before aspects, lights, faces; and their curiosity marvels, mingled with fervor.
A cultivated intelligence, imagination – or better, for a painter – invention; feeling, feelings, but of the best quality, never vulgar nor ostentatious; with this, a will and a tenacity that are fundamental, often put to severe tests, and that are not put off by difficulties; great uprightness, love of work and above all, that indefinable but obvious mark that distinguishes born artists, that slightly exalted way of being and creating.
I am delighted to find all this again when I look at Doucet’s paintings: in one, it is the same singing joy that I saw on his face when he came out of a wood and discovered a happy, sunny countryside; in another, it is the moved, thoughtful, rigorously honest effort that I sometimes witnessed.
The man and the work harmonise here in a way that is unusual and worth noting.
As for the painter in the strict sense of the word, as for his fine gifts, the nature of his talent, the extent of his means or the direction of his development, the works brought together in this exhibition will reveal them for themselves.
Charles Vildrac
in Exposition Henri Doucet, du 13 au 23 février, Marseille et Vildrac, 16, rue de Seine – 1911
(c) Frick Art Reference Library ; courtesy of Jon Auman