September Morn

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Matinee de Septembre (or September Morn) was painted by the French artist Paul Émile Chabas (1869-1937) over three summers, ending in 1912, and won a medal in a Paris art show that year but did not create any sensation.

Paul Chabas's September Morn has been labeled as "kitsch" by critics who think it lacks interesting artistic features: contrast, coordinated lines, and a worthy subject; instead the painting rather leans towards the melodramatic. Its fame is more derived from scandal than from anything else.

The next year, when it was in a window of an art gallery in Manhattan, New York (USA), it caught the attention of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), a self-appointed crusader against "vice" at the time whose campaign to have the "dirty picture" suppressed made it famous. The public relations pioneer Harry Reichenbach claimed to have brought it to Comstock's attention as a contract job for the targeted gallery.

Lithograph copies of the artwork were popularly sold for over a decade, extending the success that followed the scandal.

Ultimately, the painting would be labelled as—and is often cited as an example of—kitsch. Copies of the image are still sold on postcards, etc...

Still today, for whatever reason, September Morn probably belongs more to the collective unconscious than any other of the images Paul Chabas created.

The original painting is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.