Clovis Cazes Painting Landscape Garden In Spring Oil On Canvas Circa 1900

Framed and signed work by Clovis Cazes depicting a park/garden in bloom with roses in spring with an impressionist treatment. 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 - these artists each enjoyed a certain notoriety among 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 standards of pictorial representation. Appointed official painter of the Navy in 1914, his career was widely acclaimed by critics, as he received numerous awards 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 is influenced by the folkloric figures of Spain, of which he painted many portraits of Andalusian women. The Iberian character of these figures, like Goya's chimeras and these souls brought to life in painting, does not obscure a diversity of subjects despite the brevity of his career. Clovis Cazes offers a strong painting of historical and mythological subjects, sometimes landscapes of travels in Europe, comprising impasto of material and a false clumsiness of representation to develop a singular art, profoundly pictorial and human.