Emile Marie Beaume (1887-1967) Walking Tiger

Emile Marie BEAUME (1887-1967) Tiger walking c.1930, oil on canvas, 66 x 86 cm, signed lower right, frame 1930, (Framed dimensions 76 x 97 cm). small cracks.

                            French painter, lithographer, engraver and fresco artist, Émile Marie Beaume was born in Pézenas in 1888. From childhood, his family immersed him in a rich cultural and artistic bath, notably his father, Georges Beaume, novelist and art critic. His father's close friends, Alphonse Daudet, Pierre Loti, as well as Marshal Lyautey, nourished the young boy's imagination, who very quickly developed a strong taste for the Orient and travel.
                            Emile-Marie Beaume studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in the workshops of painters Fernand Cormon, François Flameng and Adolphe Déchenauld. A talented draftsman, the artist was assigned to the army's cartography service when the war broke out in 1914. There he produced plans and topographical surveys. In 1917, Beaume was mobilized in Morocco by the French army. This trip will profoundly influence his work. In Morocco, Beaume began to paint street scenes and portraits. Returning to France at the end of the conflict, Emile Beaume continued to paint in this vein, providing alongside his street scenes, luminous landscapes of the Maghreb.
                          In 1921, he received the First Grand Prix de Rome for an oil on canvas entitled “Burial of Saint Anthony”. The artist subsequently became a recognized master of wall decoration and fresco art, carrying out numerous monumental commissions for private hotels, casinos and public buildings. From 1927 to 1932, he was a drawing professor at the Manufacture nationale des Gobelins.
                            Emile Beaume continues his travels in North Africa. During the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931, he decorated part of the Madagascar Pavilion. In 1937, his panels representing scenes from North Africa were at the International Exhibition. Winner of the French Equatorial Africa Prize in 1937, he traveled to Oubangui-Chari, Chad and the Belgian Congo. After the Second World War, the artist devoted himself to decorating the palaces of great Moroccan and Ethiopian families. In 1945, he painted a fresco for the Palace of the Governor of Djibouti. In 1948, in Casablanca, he decorated a villa for the king of Morocco.
                            Émile Marie Beaume died in 1967 The artist donated his studio to Pézenas, his hometown, in 1950
Decors: Chapel of the Ancien Petit Séminaire known as the Chapel of Remembrance, Orne Paintings in the churches of the Holy Spirit in Paris.

Bibliography Thornton Lynne, The Africanists, traveling painters: 1860-1960, ACR Edition