Augustins - La Folie de Titania - Paul Jean Gervais 1897 2004 1 188

Paul-Jean-Louis Gervais (7 September 1859 – 11 March 1944) was a French painter who was fashionable around the end of the 19th century. He is known for his sensuous paintings of nude women.

Life

Paul-Jean-Louis Gervais was born in

Toulouse Toulouse ( , ; oc, Tolosa ) is the prefecture of the French department of Haute-Garonne and of the larger region of Occitania. The city is on the banks of the River Garonne, from the Mediterranean Sea, from the Atlantic Ocean and from Pa ...

, France on 7 September 1859. He was a pupil of

Jean-Léon Gérôme Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904) was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880." The ra ...

(1824–1904) and of

Gabriel Ferrier Gabriel-Joseph-Marie-Augustin Ferrier (29 September 1847 in Nîmes – 6 June 1914 in Paris) was a French portrait painter and orientalist. Biography His father was a pharmacist. He began his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he worke ...

(1847–1914). Paul Gervais was teaching at the Académie Julian in 1887, where one of his pupils was Abbott Fuller Graves. In July 1891 Gervais won the Prix du Salon with 19 votes against 16 for M. Chigot and 5 for M. Henri Martin. In 1904 Gervais was at the

Académie Vitti The Académie Vitti was an art school in Paris, France. It was founded and operated by a family of Italian artists' models from the Valle di Comino to the south of Rome. The academy was progressive in its support for women artists, and gained a hi ...

, where he taught the British artist

Charles Ginner Charles Isaac Ginner (4 March 1878 – 6 January 1952) was a British painter of landscape and urban subjects. Born in the south of France at Cannes, of British parents, in 1910 he settled in London, where he was an associate of Spencer Gore a ...

. He died in Paris on 11 March 1944.

Work

Paul Gervais's paintings celebrate seductive women, love, and the virtues of civilization. Pierre Bardou-Job, one of the founders of the JOB cigarette paper company, died in 1892,. His son-in-law

Jules Pams Jules Pams (14 August 1852 – 12 May 1930) was a French politician who was a deputy from 1893 to 1904, then a senator from 1904 to 1930. He was Minister of Agriculture from 1911 to 1913 and Minister of the Interior from 1917 to 1920. In 1913 he w ...

commissioned the architect and designer Léopold Carlier to remodel Bardou's Hôtel Pams in Perpignan to his taste. The paintings were by Paul Gervais, a fashionable artist at the time. Gervais also decorated the casinos in Monaco and Nice and the Capitole in Toulouse. An 1895 book reported with grave disapproval that Around 1900 Gervais produced the painting ''Fright'', now lost but reproduced as the frontispiece to Filson Young's ''The Complete Motorist'' (1904). It depicted nymphs and centaurs fleeing from a car that is approaching them along a winding coast road with its headlights blazing. The painting was exhibited at the 1904 Salon. In 1909 he created a huge painting that covered the north wall of the Salle Empire of the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo. It depicted nubile young women playing with peacocks and cheetahs, watched by a catlike Sphinx. Gervais made original watercolor illustrations on Japanese paper for a special edition of ''Le Maison sur le Nil'' by

Pierre Louÿs Pierre Louÿs (; 10 December 1870 – 4 June 1925) was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who sought to "express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection". ...

, which was sold for a high price in 1909.

Publications

Notes

Sources

* * * * * * * * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Gervais, Paul 1859 births 1944 deaths 19th-century French painters 20th-century French painters 20th-century French male artists French genre painters French Realist painters Artists from Toulouse 19th-century French male artists