Maurice Chabas (1862–1947) Spiritualist Composition, Oil On Canvas, Signed, Circa 1910

Adistinctive figure in French Symbolism, Maurice Chabas occupies a unique place in the history of spiritualist painting. Trained at the Académie Julien, he began exhibiting in the 1890s at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, of which he became a member, while also participating in the Salons de la Rose+Croix organized by Joséphin Péladan between 1892 and 1897. His early works, filledwith allegorical figures, angels, and ideal visions, are fully in keeping with the Symbolist aesthetic of the late 19th century.

Starting in the 1910s, his work underwent a decisive evolution. Inspired by his esoteric and spiritual explorations, but above all thanks to his close relationship with the astronomer Camille Flammarion, Chabas gradually abandoned figurative representation in favor of a pictorial language based on light, color rhythms, and concentric forms, seeking to convey invisible realities rather than to illustrate them. This direction made one of the precursors of spiritual abstraction in France, developed in parallel with the European explorations of Kandinsky and Kupka, but along a deeply personal path.

This painting belongs precisely to this transitional period. It still retains the atmospheric resonances of his Symbolist world while foreshadowing the cosmological compositions of the 1920s and 1930s, when color and the vibration of light became the primary vehicles for a mystical philosophy inspired by the observation of the stars and the celestial spheres.