Georges jules victor clarin biography books

We seem to know remarkably little about Georges Jules Victor Clairin , although in his day he was a popular and successful artist. His surviving work is puzzling, in that it spans almost every genre and style, from almost illustrative depictions of society women in the late eighteenth century, to piles of dead men and camels in the North African desert.

Clairin had a reputation of being a socialite, and the first group of his paintings are in keeping with that. Many of these paintings, like Elegant Figures Watching the Regatta , are, judging by the fashions shown, set in s.

Georges Jules Victor Clairin was

Although there are glimpses of some apparently interesting characters, such as the woman and child on the left, this is really all frills and giggles. Change the date, change the fashions, and a couple of the elegant ladies who were watching that regatta become Elegant Ladies Fishing date not known. Clairin here takes them off to walk in the fresh breeze by the sea, in Elegant Couple at the Coast.

In La Fete, he borrows liberally from a multiplicity of different historical periods — classical marble, mediaeval, and rather later dress, I fancy. One of his later paintings from about brings an elegant group out among the lush blossoms On the Balcony. The Great Wave was shown at the Salon in Paris that year. I apologise for this monochrome image of it, as I have been unable to locate any more recent colour version.

She is shouting, bellowing her command, and holding her left hand high, clutching a blend of hair and seaweed. Then from the following year, Clairin offers us this extraordinary Bust of a Woman in Profile Perhaps another sea-nymph, she is wearing the most bizarre headgear which appears to have grown from coral. It has peculiar pedicles which sweep over her hair, and excrescences which look like the bodies of fabulous birds.

His painting of Kelp-burning at the Pointe du Raz shows Breton women working in arduous conditions at the far western tip of mainland France, hauling seaweed up from the beach, and burning it as a product, perhaps to be applied as fertiliser, or consumed by distant industry. The French occupation around 4 June may itself have been relatively peaceful, but by the end of July had been declared a siege, with the arrest and imprisonment of many Venetians.