Painting By Jean Gabriel Domergue

Jean Gabriel DOMERGUE 1880 - 1962 Portrait - oil on panel signed lower left 19 x 15cm - framed 38 x 32 cm Jean-Gabriel Domergue was born in Bordeaux on March 4, 1889. A painter with extremely precocious talent, Domergue, then only 17 years old, exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1906. In 1913, he was awarded the Second Prix de Rome, the gold medal at the Salon in 1920, and then exhibited Hors-Concours. First noted for his landscapes, which he painted with great ease, it was from the 1920s onwards that the decisive turning point in his career took place. He then became the painter of "the Parisian woman". Domergue would invent a new type of woman, slim, casual, graceful, always elegant, and whose large eyes looked at the world with envy, from the top of a stretched neck. "I am the inventor of the pin-up," he would later declare. He would paint around 3,000 portraits. While Domergue painted many nudes (his models were generally fashionable actresses or young dancers), he was also, and above all, the painter of the aristocracy and socialites of all kinds (Liane de Pougy and Nadine, the future Baroness de Rothschild, for example). Domergue would also be one of the greatest organizers of memorable parties in Paris ("Le Bal Vénitien" at the Opera in 1922 or others on the theme of the Second Empire), but also in Cannes, Monte-Carlo, Juan-les-Pins, Biarritz and, of course, Deauville. Highly influential, he played a key role in the evolution of the fashion of his time. He designed numerous models of dresses, hats and accessories for the most famous couturiers, including Paul Poiret and Henry Marque. If 1920 marks Domergue's definitive shift towards female representation (alone or in couples), the evolution of his style continued throughout his artistic career. Its almost definitive form appeared at the beginning of the 1930s. He was then at his peak and from this period on, his paintings are no longer dated, although often titled on the back (oil canvases or hardboard panels) and sometimes numbered. It is the knowledge of this evolution that will allow a trained eye to situate the work with relative precision. Domergue has the art of highlighting the light and sparkling side of the pretty woman as we imagine her. His virtuosity and the elegance of his brush place him in the lineage of Fragonnard and Watteau, artists who in the 18th century contributed to establishing the canons of beauty of their time. His classical training spiced with fantasy, make a portrait of Domergue unlike any other. If until then, women generally seemed melancholic and evanescent, in Domergue, they are quite the opposite. Women become light, airy, sparkling like champagne bubbles, thus announcing in their own way the feminine revolution of the coming decades, and no one can remain indifferent to the gaiety, sensitivity and subtle graphicity of his touch. One aspect of Jean-Gabriel Domergue's life is less well known: from 1955 he was the Curator of the Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris. Under his leadership, extraordinary exhibitions were organized there, devoted in particular to Leonardo da Vinci, Seurat, Prud'Hon, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Berthe Morisot and Francisco Goya. It was during the organization of the one dedicated to his master, Giovanni Boldini, that he died in 1962. Domergue was a Knight of the Legion of Honor and a member of the Institute at the Academy of Fine Arts.