“Still Life with Fruit and Bowl” Oil on canvas 13.5” x 16.75”
Georges d’Espagnat was painter, illustrator and stage designer. He left for Paris at the age of 18 to attend the School of Fine Arts. His first exhibition was at the Salon des Refuses and he exhibited regularly at the Salon des Independents, the Salon d’Automne, the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris and New York, where d’Espagnat gave a one-man show. While at the academy, d’Espagnat rejected the formalities of the academy and went on his own to study the great masters and paint with the avant-garde artists of the day. In Paris, d’Espagnat studied the work of Delacroix, Desur, Rembrandt and Rubens at the Louvre. He traveled to Italy to study the Venetian Masters. He also traveled throughout Europe frequently during his life as well as Morocco. D’Espagnat was a mainstream Post-Impressionist and had close relationships with many avant-garde critics, composers and poets of the period and exhibited and worked alongside Claude Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, Camille Pissaro, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Signac, Maurice Denis, Armand Guillaumin, Marc Chagall, Louis Valtat and many others. He served as a soldier in the trenches at Ariens during the First World War. In 1920 d’Espagnat bought a country house in the Quercy region and over the next decade painted numerous landscapes and interiors. During the 1930s he worked in various media. He illustrated Alphonse Daudet’s L’Immortel (Paris, 1930) and also produced theatre designs. Throughout his career, he was an influential figure in the artistic community. In 1936 he became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He was Vice President of the Salon d’Automne. In 1936 he decorated the Mairie in Vincennes; in 1938 the Palais de Justice in Toulouse and in 1939 the ceiling of the Salle Victor Hugo in the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris. Though disrupted by World War II, he continued to paint until his death and with his pupil Suzanne Humbert, illustrated Francis Jammes’s Clairières dans le ciel, 1902–1906 (Paris, 1948). Museums: Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Brussels, Musée Royaux de Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Musée d’Art Moderne; Douai, Musée de la Chartreuse; Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lehman Collection; Paris, Musée Eugène Delacroix; Paris, Musée d’Orsay; Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Saint-Tropez, Musée d‘Annonciade.
