Signed Post-Impressionist Oil Painting, Landscape with Trees by Henri Stenn (1903-1993), Mid-Century French Forest Scene on Panel

An avenue of tall trees runs into the depth of the panel, their trunks rising bare for most of their height before opening into a canopy of green and teal that closes the top of the picture. Three or four small figures walk away down the path, two of them touched with red, reduced to a few strokes each. On either side the ground falls away to open fields in pale yellow and green, and a low horizon shows through the trunks at the left and the right. The paint is laid on thickly with a loaded brush, the foliage built in short dabs and the path in long horizontal strokes that carry the eye toward the far end of the avenue.

Henri Stenn (1903-1993) was a French painter who worked in an Impressionist manner through the twentieth century. His subjects were parks, tree lined avenues and street views, handled with loose brushwork and a palette that placed atmosphere before detail. The tree lined avenue running into depth is one of the oldest devices in French landscape painting, used to draw the viewer into the picture, and Stenn returned to it throughout his career. His works have appeared at auction in France.

The painting is on Isorel panel, a hardboard support widely used by French painters from the 1940s onward for its stability and its smooth surface. It is signed at the lower left and presented in a carved and whitewashed frame with a pale grey slip, which shows small gaps.