About this work
*Salome* is an oil on canvas measuring 28 × 23 inches, and it is immediately, unmistakably ablaze.
The palette belongs to what scholars call Icart's "red" period — rich, fiery blends of reds, yellows, and gold tonalities that pulse with heat and drama. The subject, Salome — the biblical temptress whose dance demanded the head of John the Baptist — is rendered with a theatricality that Icart understood instinctively, having grown up immersed in the plays of Victor Hugo. The composition commands attention before the viewer has even registered its details: the warm chromatic intensity radiates outward, and the figure at its center, caught in a moment of charged stillness, holds the eye with the authority of a performer who knows exactly what she is doing.
Painted around 1920 and deeply influenced by the Impressionist masters Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in its paint handling, *Salome* is further distinguished by the identity of its model: Icart's wife, Fanny Volmers, posed for the figure.
In 1920, Icart had just exhibited at the Paris Simonson Gallery — a moment of ambition and creative consolidation as he was transitioning from the patriotic wartime sketches of a fighter pilot back into the sensuous, color-drunk world of his painting. Many of his early atmospheric paintings are in shades of brown, gold, and red, with his pictures becoming brighter as his career progressed — making *Salome* a defining document of this earlier, more smoldering register. The work was housed in Charles Martignette's private collection for over two decades , underscoring its significance among serious collectors of Icart's painted — as opposed to printed — output.
This is a painting for a room that can hold it: a deep-toned study, a dining room with dark walls, a living space lit by warm evening light that picks up the golds in the canvas and makes them answer back. Icart's female figures in seductive poses — often in the guise of the courtesan or temptress — were widely published in the 1920s and '30s , but *Salome* in oil is something rarer and more personal than his printed work — closer to obsession than decoration. It suits a collector drawn to the mythological femme fatale, to the intersection of biblical narrative and Art Deco sensibility, or simply to paint that feels alive with urgency. The mood is one of dangerous glamour, held at the exact moment before something irreversible occurs.
