Clovis Cazes Painting Mediterranean Landscape Seaside Oil On Canvas Circa 1900

Oil on canvas signed Clovis Cazes. Landscape painting, overlooking Catalonia (around Barcelona) where the artist stayed. Cliff and cypress trees falling onto the Mediterranean. The work is framed. Clovis Cazes (1883-1918) was a painter born in Lannepax of Gascon origin. Coming from a modest family in the Gers region, he obtained a scholarship at the age of seventeen to study at the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Toulouse, before entering the École des beaux-arts in Paris in 1904. There, he studied under the prestigious Fernand Cormon, Carolus Duran, Jean-Paul Laurens, and Jean-Jacques Henner—each of these artists having achieved a certain notoriety in Parisian circles. He thus benefited from a relatively classical training oriented towards subjects of history, mythology, and portraits. He remained open to the modernity of the beginning of the century, which was fully expressed in Paris, marked by the exploration of color and the avant-garde modification of the norms of pictorial representation. Appointed official painter of the Navy in 1914, his career was widely acclaimed by critics, as he received numerous prizes during his training and in 1909 won a one-year scholarship to study in Italy, from which he brought back some works. He also frequented other artists from the Southwest, such as the Landes natives Alex Lizal and Jean-Roger Sourgen. During the First World War, he was quickly discharged for medical reasons and sent to Spain as an attaché at the consulate in Valencia. He remained there until his death from Spanish flu in 1918. His work was influenced by the folkloric figures of Spain, of which he painted many portraits of Andalusian women. The Iberian character of these characters, like Goya's chimeras and these souls brought to life in painting, does not obscure a diversity of subjects treated despite the brevity of his career. Clovis Cazes offers a strong painting of historical and mythological subjects, sometimes landscapes of travels in Europe, including impasto of material and a false clumsiness of representation to develop a singular art, profoundly pictorial and human.