Large Art Nouveau Decorative Panel, Allegory of the Grape Harvest, by the Couteau & Duhamel Workshop in Calais

On this large panel in horizontal format, a young woman draped in a white veil and a pink fabric, with loose red hair, reaches her arms towards the bunches of grapes of a trellis with generous vines. The background opens onto a lakeside landscape with bluish distances, treated in a soft palette of almond greens, ochres and powdery pinks. The composition is set within a reserve with incurved spandrels framed by a fillet on a cream ground, and bears at the lower right the stamp of the workshop. Flower-woman, undulating hair and celebration of the cycles of nature: this allegory of the grape harvest belongs fully to the Art Nouveau aesthetic, in the spirit of the decorative panels of Alphonse Mucha. It is the work of the decorative painting workshop Couteau & Duhamel in Calais, whose address stamp appears on the canvas — a documented testimony of regional decorative production circa 1900. Condition report: Good overall condition for a large decor of this period. Canvas sound with fresh, clearly legible polychromy, a small visible accident at the left border and localised wear around the edges, without affecting the subject. A spectacular panel full of grace, for a bedhead, a dining room or a drawing-room wall.