Carel de Nerée tot Babberich - Faun

Carel de Nerée tot Babberich (1880–1909)

Faun

1904

Black ink, Indian ink and silver paint on woven paper

35.3 × 21.8 cm

Literature:

Illustrated in Sander Bink, Verfijnde Lijnen: Carel de Nerée tot Babberich, 1880–1909, WBOOKS (2025).

Provenance:

De Nerée family; Van Marle & Bignell 1940; d’Audretsch; Karel Citroen; Piccadilly Gallery; Dick & Joke Veeze; Barry Humphries; Christie’s 2025; Mireille Mosler, Ltd.

Exhibitions:

Including Haagse Kunstkring 1910; Arti 1910; Singer 1974–75.

Additional information:

The year 1904 marks the absolute high point of Carel de Nerée’s artistic career. During these years he created the works for which he is now regarded as one of the most remarkable representatives of Dutch Symbolism. Faun undoubtedly belongs to this group of masterpieces.

Here the artist combines his characteristic ink lines with watercolour and silver paint, creating an image that is at once decorative, sensual and psychologically charged. The work demonstrates why critics would later place De Nerée in the same breath as artists such as Klimt, Khnopff and Somov.

The faun depicted here has little in common with the gentle pastoral figures of the nineteenth century. De Nerée’s faun is an ambiguous and androgynous being in which lust, movement and seduction are central. Mallarmé’s famous poem L’après-midi d’un faune may have played a role, although De Nerée gives it a much darker and more erotic interpretation.

As so often in his oeuvre, clear boundaries between male and female disappear. The figure possesses both masculine and feminine characteristics and thus occupies the borderland that is so characteristic of De Nerée’s imaginative world.

Carel de Nerée tot Babberich (1880–1909) was one of the most intriguing Dutch Symbolists of his time. Well versed in literature, charismatic and active within Hague society, he developed a visual language strongly influenced by Aubrey Beardsley: graphically refined, Gothic in atmosphere and infused with a subtle decadence.