Portrait Of A Woman, Breton Nabie

A self-taught painter with a very personal style, both powerful and bewitching, Albert Clouard moved to Paris in 1888 after having made a career as a lawyer in Rennes and amassed a sufficient fortune to live from his passion. There he made the acquaintance of the symbolist poets of his time, taking part in the Celtic dinners organized by the ethnographer Narcisse Quellien, which aimed to bring together in the capital, Breton artists and sympathizers of Brittany. He was nicknamed the "clandestine nabi" by Maurice Denis whom he met with his wife Marthe, during the summer of 1897 in Perros-Guierec, giving rise to a long friendship as well as to a work painted in correspondence. Also a poet, Clouard's painted work is an ode to legendary, Celtic, Christian and sacred Brittany, where the flat areas of synthetism harmoniously delineate decorative compositions in muted and matt tones. (Ill.1) Despite the absence of a signature, our feminine sketch with cloisonné features and a soft mysterious expressiveness evokes in all respects the nabi graphic style of Albert Clouard.
Ill.1. Albert Clouard, La Vierge des Grèves, 1895, huile sur toile, 65,2 x 82 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest, Inv. M0197.
Bibliography: Exhibition catalogue, Around the Symbolists and the Nabis of the Museum, The Painters of Dreams in Brittany, Brest Museum of Fine Arts, 2017. (Coll. F. Cuillandre, F. Daniel, P. Le Guillou, D Delouche, A. Delannoy, G. Lacambre)