Maurice Chabas The Virgin Mary Gouache Or Oil On Paper

Maurice Chabas (1862-1947)

The Virgin Mary

Gouache or oil on paper
Signature lower right Maurice Chabas

Good condition, some holes on the right

Dimensions: 49.7 x 35 cm Price on request Maurice Chabas was born in Nantes. The son of a wealthy merchant and amateur painter, he was the older brother of the painter Paul-Émile Chabas. His father, an amateur painter, encouraged the artistic vocation of his two sons Maurice and Paul, while their older brother, Charles, took over the family business. After attending the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, the two young men, whose family moved to Paris, benefited from the teachings of the Académie Julian. Both students of William Bougereau and Tony Robert-Fleury, they gradually took very different paths. Closer to his masters, Paul-Émile developed a more worldly style, focusing on the female figure and the nude. Conversely, Maurice, after devoting himself to a gallant pre-Raphaelitism in the 1890s, gradually turned to the symbolist landscape. Maurice Chabas, an atypical painter: He simultaneously produced a body of work with the most diverse aesthetics. Moving indifferently from academicism to Symbolism, Nabi or a certain abstraction, he refused to subscribe to a single aesthetic and sought above all to elevate the spirit and reveal Beauty. His metaphysical reflections and his spiritual quest led him to frequent theologians, Hindu mystics, astronomers such as Camille Flammarion, spiritualists and occultists including Joséphin Péladan, founder of the Salon de la Rose-Croix where he exhibited from 1892 to 1897. This plurality of styles is based on the same idealist and spiritualist conception, which animates all his work. Chabas, in fact, was convinced of the social role of the artist as a spiritual guide. He took part in the Salons and the universal exhibitions of Paris in 1900 and Brussels in 1910.