Alexandre Lunois (French, 1863-1916)

The Union Club of Cleveland by Gift of Karl Bror Albert Kronstrand, March 14, 1912

This scene of a luminous green Meadow with a cow and her calf and a barefoot boy wearily seizing each other up as an early work by Parisian born artist Alexandra Lunois who rose to fame during the 1890s as one of France's most accomplished book illustrators. His impressionistic images and live at texts by Hans Christian Anderson, Thèophile Gautier and Guy de Maupassant. His masterpiece, a suite of 75 full page original color lithographs for Jacobus de Voraigine’s  La Legende Doree (1896), is widely considered one of the great fin de siècle illustrated books.

Lenoir produced this work at age 26, the same year he was mentioned among the best anamalieres at the Paris salon who “know their craft well and study their beasts with the same conscientiousness that our portraitists give to the study of the human figure”. In fact, it was a Swedish portraitist Karl Bror Albert Kronstrand (1857-1950) who gifted the Lunois to the Club. Ten years earlier Kronstrand had been commissioned by the club to paint a likeness of club president Myron T Herrick. The Lunois very likely responsible for securing Kronstrand his most important American portrait Commission in 1910 -- that of lady Helen Herron Taft, wife of President William Howard Taft which now hangs in the grand stairway in the White House.