When he painted this work Denis was staying at Mercin, a little village in the Aisne, near Soissons, with his friend and patron Arthur Fontaine, an engineer and wealthy collector who acquired a dozen important paintings by the artist, including the Muses (Paris, Musée d’Orsay).
Like other painting by Maurice Denis from the 1890s and early 1900s, this cannot be characterised as merely arepresentation of the surrounding countryside, although we know it was painted near the small village of Mercin. It is likely to include a personal allusion and one may perceive in the person in white in the centre, the figure of Marthe Meurier (1871- 1919), his beloved wife since 1893.
The composition is divided by two lines running from the middle of the lower edge of the canvas. On the right, a road marked by a row of trees; on the left, a field with a serpentine border. This allows the landscape to unfold like a fan in front of the viewer; the avenue of trees with its cast shadows evokes the theme of the path of life dear to the symbolists. This allusion is underlined by the presence of the child and an older figure, symbolising the origin and end of human existence. Standing out in front of the golden field, a young woman dressed in white and holding a coloured bouquet, is separated from her companions by the vertical shadow of the nearest tree. She seems to glance and make a gesture towards a woman holding a horse by the bridle, who appears in the lower left corner.
This simplification of the forms is carried out with a touching delicacy, the women harvesting forming the second diagonal line, making a V with the road and line of trees at the right. Denis seeks an "art made of measure, clarity and serenity" …that“rests and elevates”, an art that is also "a creation of the mind" and not a pure transcription of nature.
It was Fra Angelico's The Coronation of the Virgin, admired during a visit to the Louvre Museum, which gave a lastingdirection to Maurice Denis's early vocation to become a painter. As the only child of parents from Normandy living inSaint-Germain-en-Laye, a short ride on the new railway from Paris, he acquired a solid literary and artistic culture at theLycée Condorcet where he met the future painters Ker Xavier Roussel and Vuillard. At the Julian Academy where heenrolled in 1888, he became friends with Ranson, Sérusier, Bonnard and Ibels with whom he founded the Nabis groupthe same year. Nicknamed by his young fellow students the "Nabi with beautiful icons" because of his Christian themes, heexhibited with them at the Barc de Boutteville from 1891 to 1897. At the Salon des Indépendants in 1891, he was noticed bythe painter and musician Henry Lerolle, who acquired several of his paintings. In Lerolle's circle of literary and musicalcircles, Denis met Mallarmé, Valery, Gide, Debussy, Chausson as well as Baron Denys Cochin. For the latter two and forLerolle, Maurice Denis created his first decorative ensembles.
Whether as the author of secular or religious decorations for public monuments or responding to private commissions,painter of easel canvases but also illustrator of great texts, Maurice Denis, a prolific artist, exploited all modes ofexpression. He left a considerable body of work that evolves from symbolism to a new classicism, marked by the imprint of the Quattrocento and purified in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes. Theorist of the Nabis group, author of manyimportant articles and a Journal, he published a sum on the History of Religious Art in 1939. In spite of his eminentlypictorial choices, Maurice Denis remains attached to a mystical dimension of painting which must transfigure nature and glorify the highest human feelings. As the leader of the revival of religious art at the beginning of the 20th century, he created in 1919 with Georges Desvallières the Ateliers d'Art Sacré, continuing to affirm his spiritual ideal in many church settings until the 1940s.
