“The red sail” in the bay of Douarnenez
Maurice Chabas, a sensitive and mystical artist, delivers a seaside with symbolist accents. A gentle harmony and great tranquility emanate from this seascape.

Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 54 x 65 cm
With frame: 67 x 77 cm

 Maurice Chabas, his love of Brittany

Since the middle of the last century, many painters from all over France and Europe have come to Brittany in search of new subjects.
Born in Nantes, Maurice Chabas maintained his love of Breton landscapes throughout his life, an essential source of his inspiration.
Brittany, a region which greatly inspired him, takes on this dimension of enigmatic serenity characteristic of the artist.

A peaceful nature imbued with a gentle harmony.

Maurice Chabas naturally turns towards the landscape, often giving it a particular, contemplative and mystical atmosphere.
Serenity, contemplation, calm, translate the state of mind of the painter at the moment of creation, reflecting the unshakeable and inner tranquility of the artist.
In our particularly bright painting, only the red sail of a boat brings the work to life without this lively accent breaking the gentle harmony that emerges from the landscape.

"From all these landscapes emanate serenity, peace, like a supreme detachment. Things seem to have lost their materiality. Their beauty tends towards the desire for absolute beauty, for that which will be both harmonic and geometric" Written by the journalist and art critic Léon de Saint-Valéry on the landscapes of Maurice Chabas

Biography

The Chabas: a family of artists 

Maurice Chabas was born in Nantes. The son of a wealthy merchant who was a lover of painting, he was the older brother of the painter Paul-Émile Chabas.
His father, an amateur painter, encouraged the artistic vocation of his two sons Maurice and Paul, while their older brother, Charles, took over the family business. After attending the School of Fine Arts in Nantes, the two young men, whose family had moved to Paris, benefited from the teachings of the Académie Julian. Both students of William Bougereau and Tony Robert-Fleury, they gradually took very different paths. Closer to his masters, Paul-Émile developed a more worldly style, focusing on the female figure and the nude. Conversely, Maurice, after devoting himself to a gallant Pre-Raphaelitism in the 18901sXNUMX, gradually turned towards the symbolist landscape. It was this second phase that ensured Maurice Chabas a number of purchases by the State.
Between 1907 and 1934, no fewer than thirteen works by Maurice Chabas, mainly landscapes painted in oils, were acquired by the Fine Arts administration.
Most of these paintings are inspired by Brittany

Maurice Chabas, an atypical painter

He simultaneously produced a body of work with the most diverse aesthetics. Moving indifferently from academicism to Symbolism, Nabi or a certain abstraction, he refused to subscribe to a single aesthetic and sought above all to elevate the spirit and reveal Beauty. His metaphysical reflections and his spiritual quest led him to frequent theologians, Hindu mystics, astronomers such as Camille Flammarion, spiritualists and occultists including Joséphin Péladan, founder of the Salon de la Rose-Croix where he exhibited from 1892 to 1897.
This plurality of styles is based on the same idealist and spiritualist conception, which animates all his work. Chabas, in fact, was convinced of the social role of the artist as a spiritual guide.
He took part in the Salons and Universal Exhibitions in Paris in 1900 and Brussels in 1910.

Decorative paints

In 1895, he was commissioned to decorate the buffet at Lyon-Perrache station with four large mounted canvases representing Allegories to the glory of Lyon silk.
In 1898, he won the open competition for the decoration of the wedding hall of the Vincennes town hall. He produced a set of seven canvases mounted in 19027.
In 1900, he painted the Marseille canvas for the main hall of the Le Train Bleu restaurant at the Gare de Lyon in Paris.

The end of life

He painted practically only religious subjects in a great vaporous luminosity which tended towards abstraction. He lived withdrawn far from his family, and thus died on December 11, 1947 at his home in Versailles.

Bibliography

• Léon Bazalgette, “The Salon of the Rose-Croix”, Essays on Free Art, Girard, Paris, 1892.
• Henry Frantz, “The decorative paintings of the new Lyon station”, L'Art décoratif, 1901, pp. 94-106.
• Count Léonce de Larmandie, The Ideal Intermission, Chacornac, Paris, 1903.
• Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, EA Seemann, Leipzig, 1912.
• Gustave Kahn, “Maurice Chabas”, Art and Artists, No. 9, April 1913.
• Collective, Maurice Chabas organizes an exhibition, April 18, 1915 [incomplete ref.].
• Gustave Kahn, Maurice Chabas, Galerie Devambez editions, Paris, 1922.
• Maurice Chabas and Gustave Kahn, Maurice Chabas – Calm and poetry in nature, exhibition catalogue, 12° brochure, Brussels, Galerie des Artistes français
• André Castelot, Maurice Chabas, published by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, 1952.
• Germaine Chanteaud, “Maurice Chabas”, Review of History of the 14th
• Gérald Schurr, The Little Masters of Painting, Value of Tomorrow, vol.2, Les Éditions de l'Amateur, 1972.
• Philippe Jullian, The Symbolists, “Library of the Arts” collection, Ides et Calendes, Neuchâtel, 1973.
• Robert Pincus-Witten, Occult symbolism in France – Joséphin Peladan and the “Salons de la Rose-Croix”, Garland Publishing, New York, 1976.
• Collective, Painters of Aristide Briand's generation in the collections of the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts, May 1982, p. 25-26.
• Janine Mery, Pelada, esotericism and the painters of the Rose-Croix, Maîtrise Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1990.
• Jean-Jacques Lévêque, The Years of the Belle Époque, Ed. Illustrated, 1991
• Jean Da Silva, The Salon of the Rose-Croix, 1892-1897, Syros-Alternatives, Paris, 1991.
• The mosaic of the Cinquantenaire hemicycle, Brabant Tourisme, March 1992.
• Gérald Schurr, The Guidargus of Painting, Les Éditions de l'Amateur, 1996.
• Emmanuel Bénézit, Dictionary of painters, sculptors, designers and engravers, vol.3, Gründ, 1999.
• Snoeck-Ducaju, The Painters of the Soul, Ghent, 1999.
• Agnès Noblet, Jean-Philippe Bouilloud, Sylvie Camet, A Universe of Artists, Ed. l'Harmattan, 2003, 548 p. (ISBN 2-747554-17 1).
• Myriam de Palma, “Maurice Chabas (1862-1947) and the worlds of the beyond”, Bulletin of the Society of French Art, 2004, pp. 379-398.
• Myriam Reiss-de-Palma, Maurice Chabas (1862-1947), catalogue raisonné of the artist and thesis in art history, Paris IV Sorbonne, November 19, 2004
• Françoise Daniel, The painters of dreams in Brittany – Around the symbolists and the Nabis of the museum, editions of the Museum of Fine Arts of Brest, 2006.
• Myriam de Palma, Maurice Chabas, painter and spiritual messenger (1862-1947), Somogy Éditions d'art, 2009.
• Sylvie Carlier, Symbolism in Rhône-Alpes – From Puvis de Chavannes to Fantin-Latour, 1880-1920, Paul-Dini museum editions, Villefranche-sur-Saône, 2010.

Museums

USA

• Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, “Serenity”,

Finland

• Helsinki, Ateneum Museum

France

• Paris: – Petit Palais 
– Gare-de-Lyon, The Blue Train: Marseille, 1900
– Town Hall of the 14th arrondissement of Paris

• Lyon, Lyon-Perrache station: Allegories of Lyon silk,

• Bourgoin-Jallieu, municipal museum.

• Brest, Brest Museum of Fine Arts

• Chambourcy, town hall: Landscape, oil on canvas.

• Laval: Old Castle Museum:

• Moirans, Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul church, Saint-Pierre

• Poissy, Museum of Art and History

• Quimper, Museum of Fine Arts 

• Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Maurice Denis Departmental Museum

• Vincennes, town hall, group of works classified as
historical monuments in 1982