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This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2003 Dec 31 @ 12:00UTC-5 : EST/CDT
Elysee Maclet French Artist of school of Montmartre 1881-1962
Place Pigale a Paris
Size Frame; 29 1/2 x 26th Inches
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<b>Artist Biography - Elysée Maclet </b>
<BR>(1881-1962)<BR>
<P> Jules Emile Elysée Maclet was the son of a gardener who lived in Lyons-en Santerre in Picardy. He was born there in 1881, and since his family was poor, at an early age he began to work as an assistant to his father. Picardy is renowned for its roses, and Maclet used to say that he was born among cabbages and roses. By the mysterious alchemy of genius, the gardener’s son wielded a painter’s brush almost as soon as he swung a pick and hoe. His father was not only a gardener, but also the sexton in the village church, so the boy inevitably became a choirboy. That brought him to the attention of the local cure, Father Delval. Father Delval was both parish priest and painter, and often in fine Sundays, when Vespers were over, he and young Maclet set out to sketch and paint along the roads or the banks of ponds.
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Puvis de Chavannes found the same scenes a source of inspiration, and on a Sunday in April, 1892 he saw some of the work the twelve-year-old boy was doing beside his clerical mentor. The great artist was so impressed that he sought out the elder Maclet and asked that he allow the boy to study with him. “My son is a gardener, and he will remain a gardener,” was the father’s reply.
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In spite of paternal opposition, Elysée Maclet gave up gardening for art. Going to Montmartre, however, did not mean immediate fame. He painted, of course, but earned his living by varnishing iron bedsteads at first; a few months later he got a job decorating the floats for the gala nights at the Moulin Rouge. He also washed dishes in one restaurant; opened oysters in another; severed as chef on a ship sailing from Marseilles for Indochina; and when he finally returned to Paris, he painted dolls in crinolines and exhibited them at the Salon de Hurnoristes. But in spite of all these occupations, he found time to paint.
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When Maclet arrived in Montmartre, much of the country charm of the area still existed and he put it on canvas, even before Utrillo did so. Biographers have rather tented to pass over in silence the services Maclet rendered to Utrillo. Maclet knew practically all the future great painters of his time, Utrillo among them and it is certain that he aided the start-crossed genius, though his own reluctance to have people write about him may account for the fact that we know of it only through oblique remarks in the records of the time Maclet painted the “Lapin Agile” and the “Moulin de la Galette” and the ‘Maison de Mimi Pinson” several years before Utrillo did. He painted them most often in winter at this period, skilfully suggesting the snow by leaving bare white spaces in his canvas or paper.
In a short time Maclet won a circle of sincere admirers. The art dealer Dosbourg bought his work, which gave him a fairy reliable source of income and enabled him to devote more time than ever to his painting. Form Montmartre he launched out into the suburbs of Paris, painting them with the same indulgent tenderness with which he treated the scenes of Montmartre.
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When war broke out in 1914, Maclet served as a medical attendant in a temporary hospital run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. That allowed him to spend his periods of leave back in Montmartre, where he stayed at the ‘Lapin Agile” thanks to the hospitality of his firnd Frede. Maclet slept in the cabaret hall and paid for his food by washing dishes and polishing the copper pots. On one of these leaves, he painted two small pictures of Sacre-Coeur and the Moulin de la Galette which he sold to a Mr. Deibler, who combined his profession of official executioner with a love of the fine arts. Mr. Deibler was not his only patron and admirer. Francis Carco, the mayor of Montmartre: the innkeeper know as “Le père gay”; the famous writer Colette; the American art dealer Hugo Perls-all regarded him as the equal of the other great painters of the period. Famous dealers of the time, such as Pierre Menant, Matho Kleimann-Boch hung Maclet’s work beside the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso in their galleries.
<P>When the war ended, Maclet went back to Montmartre to live. In 1918 Francis Carco felt the painter needed to widen his horizons and sent him to Dieppe to stay in a house which Carco had rented on a yearly basis. Soon all the wealth of the scenes of the seacoast appeared on Maclet’s canvases. He spent a year in Dieppe and then returned to Montmartre and to his former subjects. Montmartre was changing, new apartment buildings were going up, taking the place of the stretches of verdures; the Ourcq Canal would soon disappear, the last of the Landry boats were slowly gliding down the Seine. With his palette and brush and knife, Maclet seized them all and immortalized them.
<P>In 1923 Maclet entered into a contact with a wealthy Austrian manufacturer, Baron Von Fray. One of the conditions of the contract was that he leaves Paris for the south of France, for Baron Von Frey sensed that Maclet would know how to handle the brilliant light and intense colours of the Midi. The Baron’s judgment was vindicated only a few hours after Maclet’s arrival in Arles, when the son of an old and famous friend of Van Gogh’s said to him, “Not since Van Gogh have I seen a painter use colour pure as you do.” Maclet stayed in the region from 1924 o 1928. He painted in orange, Vaison-La Romaine, La Ciotat, Cassis, Golfe Juan, Antibes, Cagnes, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Ville-Franche, Nice, menton, SanRemo, sending back to VonFrey glowing landscapes and glorious floral still lifts. Von Frey reserved for himself almost the total output of this period and sent most of them to America, where wealthy collectors vied to buy them at high prices.
<P>Many magazines devoted articles to Maclet, and an exhibition of his work was presented in Paris in 1928. Von Frey also had the satisfaction of seeing paintings by Maclet purchased by important museums. But, like some years later when the museums of Lyons, Grenoble, and Monte Carlo purchased his work.
<P>At the end of 198, Maclet went to paint in Corsica. He spent 1929 and 1930 in Brittany and then went back to his native Picardy to paint. In the middle of 1933 he fell seriously ill and was unable to paint for long, long months. After 1935 he resumed his studies of Paris and in 1945 presented a large exhibition of his work under the title “Around the Moulin” which elicited from Andre Warnod the following glowing tribute: “ What a happy spectacle to see Maclet paint. He begins by covering the top of his canvas with paint, the sky, and the clouds. Then he attacks the chimneys and then the roofs, and then, floor by floor, he arrives at the street level of the houses…Under his brush, all becomes miraculously organized; he places the figures where they should be, and when he has painted the last paving block at the very bottom of the canvas, then he signs it. And the painting is finished; a happy painting expressing the joy of living.”
<P>In 1957 a Parisian gallery organized a retrospective exhibition of Maclet’s work, and the solid rise in the prices of Maclet’s paintings dates from that retrospective exhibition. When Maclet made sporadic visits to Paris during his years in the Midi, the painters of Montmartre and Montparnasse considered him a painter on the rise; the canvases he had produced while he was in the south of France showed that the peasant from Picardy had become a master; but the general public in France did not grasp his importance and value until 1957.
Five years of life remained to the painter, years beautifully described by Marcel Guicheteau and Jean Cottel in these words: “Maclet had returned to his first loves, to his first poems; but it was with all his experience, all his wisdom that the old man now bent over the familiar motifs; his minor song had become a song full of light. In the evening of his life he could repeat himself without copying himself; explain him without humiliating himself; remember him without destroying himself. He had brought his work to such a degree of perfection that each painting from then on justified itself by references to earlier work and conferred, in a certain sense, a retroactive value on those works of a far-off past. The artist had reached the state wherein his work soundly established, across the years, its various pictorial values like echoes answering each other at intervals of ten, fifteen, twenty years, all singing the same harmony.” The gardener from Picardy became a master painter.
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Absentee bidding has been extended to December 31, 2003.