Clovis Cazes Scene In Antique Style Naiads / Bathers Mediterranean Oil On Canvas Circa 1900

This masterful work by Clovis Cazes, signed and framed oil on canvas, presents an antique scene involving 6 figures in the foreground in a southern landscape. The work uses mythological motifs and objects such as the lyre or the postures of bathers, and also involves a mythological imagery with the sailing ship in the background which can symbolize a departure. A coastal village stands out in the distance and below from where the boat moves away. The palette is rather fawn, particularly in the treatment of the sky, for a work that must date from the 1900s. We feel the modernity of Clovis Cazes, a painter from Gers who trained at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. The large-format canvas shows some traces of rubbing. Clovis Cazes (1883-1918) is a painter born in Lannepax of Gascon origin. Born into a modest family in Gers, 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 having achieved a certain notoriety among Parisian circles. He thus benefited from a relatively classical training oriented toward 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 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 Alex Lizal and Jean-Roger Sourgen from Landes. 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, involving impasto of material and a false clumsiness of representation to develop a singular art, deeply pictorial and human.