A Cotton Merchant with a Passion for Art
Born in Le Havre into a Protestant family originally from Switzerland, Olivier Senn studied law in Paris before joining the bar in Le Havre. In 1893, he entered the cotton trade and became an administrator of the Compagnie cotonnière, alongside Charles-Auguste Marande, an art enthusiast like himself, and his father-in-law Ernest Siegfried.
Olivier Senn played an active role in the cultural life of Le Havre. His interest in painting became evident in 1896 when he joined the Société des amis des arts, shortly after his father, his father-in-law, and Charles-Auguste Marande. In 1902, he became an administrative member. In 1906, he became a founding member of the Cercle de l’Art Moderne, created under the impetus of the painters Braque, Dufy and Othon Friesz, alongside other major collectors from Le Havre such as Charles-Auguste Marande, Georges Jean-Aubry, Pieter Van der Velde, and Georges Dussueil.
From 1906 to 1909, the Cercle de l’Art Moderne brought together, across four exhibitions in Le Havre, approximately 272 works by artists representing the modern artistic movements of the early twentieth century. The Circle aimed to “facilitate the expression of a personal art, by organising weekly meetings, art exhibitions, chamber music concerts, and lectures devoted to the dissemination of artistic knowledge.”
The Collector
At the turn of the century, Olivier Senn assembled his collection with a particular predilection for the Impressionists (Sisley, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Guillaumin), Post-Impressionists, and landscape painting.
He enriched his collection according to opportunity: buying, selling, and exchanging canvases, extending it to Neo-Impressionists (Cross), Nabis (Sérusier, Bonnard, Vuillard), and Fauves (Marquet, Matisse). Over forty years, he collected works by Picasso, Renoir, Monet, Marquet, Degas, and Vallotton, acquiring them through studio sales, auctions at Drouot, and direct purchases from artists. Olivier Senn also acquired works from the second half of the nineteenth century (Delacroix, Courbet).
An eclectic art lover, Olivier Senn made bold acquisitions that sometimes unsettled those close to him. He identified artists whose talent is now universally acknowledged. He purchased a Van Gogh, only to resell it once its value had doubled.
He was also interested in drawings, notably acquiring more than forty early drawings by Degas, as well as watercolours and pastels by Boudin, Guillaumin, and Cross. He obtained these works on the art market, through Parisian galleries such as Bernheim-Jeune, Druet, and Durand-Ruel, or at auction houses. A discerning collector, Olivier Senn was nonetheless not “a collector of all the avant-gardes”. With the exception of Marquet, Guillaumin and Vallotton, he purchased relatively few contemporary works. He was nevertheless the first French buyer of Giorgio de Chirico. One work stands apart in his collection: Bougival by the Fauvist André Derain. This painting had been acquired by his father-in-law, who in 1905 sought to provoke his son-in-law and his avant-garde tastes by offering him one of the “most eccentric and most ugly” works exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants.
Donations to the MuMa
His granddaughter Hélène Senn-Foulds inherited this family collection from her father. In 2004, she bequeathed to the Musée Malraux in Le Havre two hundred works, paintings, drawings, watercolours, and sculptures, from the Olivier Senn collection. In 2009, she donated her father Édouard Senn’s collection (Le Havre 1901 – Sallanches 1992) to the MuMa, comprising sixty-seven additional works, including forty-five paintings, fifteen drawings, five prints, and five sculptures, signed by Picasso or de Staël. In July 2015, Pierre-Maurice Mathey, Olivier Senn’s grandson by marriage, made a further donation, enabling seventeen additional works, ten paintings and seven drawings by Pissarro, Degas, Marquet, Guillaumin, and Boudin, to enter the MuMa.
