Dreams Set at the Table: Le Sidaner and Syd Barrett

“Wined and dinedOh it seemed just like a dreamGirl was so kindKind of love I’d never seen

Only last summer, it’s not so long agoJust last summer, now musk winds blow…“

(Syd Barrett, Wined and Dined)

Henri le Sidaner, The Table in the Gerberoy Garden at Dusk, c 1900s

Henri Le Sidaner’s paintings often present us with a mystery: tables set for supper in the hush of twilight, candles glowing, glasses waiting, flowers in the vase blooming and breathing in the fragrant air at dusk, fruit ripening before our eyes into darker more delicious hues, but there are never any figures to complete the scene. The silence is tender, dreamy, fragile, but it is not haunting. Le Sidaner’s compositions are suffused with a soft impressionism that makes the absence of people feel like an invitation rather than a loss. The table is laid, the evening descends slowly, tenderly, and we are left on the threshold of something; of dreams, of intimacy, as though the hosts have only just stepped away, or as though we ourselves are the awaited guests. It this sense, Le Sidaner’s tables in the garden scenes, and he painted many such scenes, feel almost personal.

Gazing at painting “The Table, Twilight or The Table in the Garden”, one has that wonderful, uncanny sensation of being inside a dream of hospitality: the wine is poured but untouched, the fruit and the flowers are there to delight our senses, and there is a soft glow coming from the windows on the house in the background, indicative of a presence of people. The branches of some unknown tree is leaning over into the painting, as if the branches are the guests at dinner, as if they are about to grow and get tangled in those white chairs. It is love without faces, desire without bodies. The entire drama of companionship is staged, yet the figures remain spectral. What lingers is not presence but promise. Whenever I am looking at Henri Le Sidaner’s paintings of these tables-at-dusk scenes I always keeping hearing the bittersweet, touching, lyrical Syd Barrett’s words float naturally across Le Sidaner’s twilight tables:

“Wined and wined, oh it seemed just like a dream, girl was so kind, kind of love I’ve never seen.”

Syd’s lyrics hold the same fragile tension between immediacy and dream, between the sensuality of sharing wine and the unreality of the moment itself. Both Barrett and Le Sidaner hover in that luminous space where love feels almost too tender to be real, where kindness and beauty shimmer like a fleeting apparition. The tables in Henri Le Sidaner are the visual equivalent of Barrett’s refrain “oh it seemed just like a dream.” They show us not the feast but the aura of it, not the lovers but the glow of their imagined kindness. The absence of people allows us to project our own longings into the painting: the dream of love that might arrive, the memory of evenings once shared and the hope for the shared evenings, the desire for gentleness in a world that often withholds it, the memory of those rare tender moments that life has allowed us to experience. Together, the painter and the psychedelic rock poet remind us that the most intimate moments often exist on the edge of presence; in the expectation of company, in the echo of a song, in the dream of “wined and dined” with a love so kind that it feels so impossibly dreamy that it borders on surreal.