The improvised dance

Gustave Alaux is passionate about maritime events and overseas histories. His obsession with painting these subjects was the reason he applied to join the corps of painters of the Secretariat of the Navy and was accepted in 1926: During his artistic career, he produced a prolific series of paintings dedicated to scenes and customs inspired by locations in the French West lndies, a good selection of which is in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.

Thanks to Alaux’s beautifully detailed landscapes, it is possible to locate the scene of The lmprovised Dance in Cap-Haitien, in the north of Haití. During the nineteenth century, this bay was considered the safest harbour on the island. Morne Jean mountain dominates the range in the background.

Both the subject of the painting and the style adopted by Alaux inevitably reference another renowned artist, Agostino Brunias, of ltalian origin but who spent much of his career in the West lndies during the eighteenth century. Specifically, the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection includes a work by the artist entitled West lndian Village with Figures Dancing, which justifies this clear parallelism. Comparing the works that are almost two centuries apart in time, we can see similarities in the composition, such as a palm tree opening the scene on the left, the bay in the background and a mass of vegetation closing the work on the right.

Unlike Brunias, whose images are well regarded by ethnogra¬phers and anthropologists for their authenticity and fidelity of observation, Alaux’s representations manifest a “primitivist” or naif character. According to Javier Arnaldo, Brunias’ works played a key role in the propaganda for manumission in the Revolutionary period. In this sense, lt is likely that Alaux turned to these images for a pictorial interpretation of colonial customs, based on a work that had achieved great prestige as anti-slavery iconography.

Finally, regarding the figures, we can distinguish two groups: occupying the entire lower diagonal part of the painting are the people taking part in the “improvised dance” – the dancers, musicians and lovers, the women in brightly coloured dresses and the men in linen. Behind them are two naked-chested figures who seem not to bejoining in the party and with whom, opposite us, as spectators, we share the action of observing.

Pilar Giró