Georges Rouault
(born May 27, 1871, Paris, France?died February 13, 1958, Paris) was a French painter, printmaker, ceramicist, and maker of
stained glass
who, drawing inspiration from French
medieval
masters, united religious and
secular
traditions divorced since the Renaissance.
Rouault was born in a cellar in
Paris
during a bombardment of the city by the forces opposed to the
Commune
. His father was a cabinetmaker. A grandfather took an interest in art and owned a collection of
Honore Daumier
’s
lithographs
; Rouault said later that he “went first to school with Daumier.” In 1885 he enrolled in an evening course at the Paris Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. From 1885 to 1890 he was apprenticed in a glazier’s workshop; his mature style as a painter was undoubtedly influenced by his work on the restoration of medieval stained-glass windows, including those of
Chartres cathedral
. In 1891 he entered the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts
, where he soon became one of the favourite pupils of the Symbolist painter
Gustave Moreau
, in a class that also included the young
Henri Matisse
and Albert Marquet. After the death of Moreau in 1898, a small Paris museum was created for his pictures, and Rouault became the curator.
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Rouault’s early style was academic. But around 1898 he went through a psychological crisis, and, subsequently, partly under the influence of
Vincent van Gogh
,
Paul Gauguin
, and
Paul Cezanne
, he evolved in a direction that made him, by the 1905 Paris
Salon d’Automne
, a fellow traveller of the
Fauves
(Wild Beasts), who favoured the arbitrary use of strong colour. Until the beginning of
World War I
, his most effective medium was
watercolour
or oil on paper, with dominant blues, dramatic lighting, emphatic forms, and an expressive scribble.
Rouault’s artistic evolution was accompanied by a religious one, for he had become, about 1895, an
ardent
Roman Catholic. He became a friend of the Catholic
intellectuals
Joris-Karl Huysmans
and
Leon Bloy
. Through another friend, a deputy public prosecutor, he began to frequent, as had Daumier, the Paris law courts, where he had a close view of humanity apparently fallen from the grace of God. His favourite subjects became prostitutes, tragic clowns, and pitiless judges.
Without completely abandoning watercolour, after 1914 Rouault turned more and more toward the
oil
medium. His paint layers became thick, rich, and sensuous, his forms simplified and monumental, and his colours and heavy black lines reminiscent of stained-glass windows. His subject matter became more specifically religious, with a greater
emphasis
on the possibility of redemption than he had put into his pre-1914 work. In the 1930s he produced a particularly splendid series of paintings on the
Passion
of Christ; typical examples are
Christ Mocked by Soldiers
,
The Holy Face
, and
Christ and the High Priest
. During these years he got into the habit of reworking his earlier pictures;
The Old King
, for instance, is dated 1916?36.
Between World Wars I and II, at the instigation of the Paris art dealer
Ambroise Vollard
, Rouault devoted much time to engravings, illustrating
Les Reincarnations du Pere Ubu
by Vollard,
Le Cirque de l’etoile filante
by Rouault himself,
Les Fleurs du mal
by
Charles Baudelaire
, and
Miserere
(his masterpiece in the genre), with captions by Rouault. Some of this work was left unfinished for a time and published later. In 1929 he designed the sets and costumes for a production by
Serge Diaghilev
of
Sergey Prokofiev
’s ballet
The Prodigal Son
. In 1937 he also did the cartoons for a series of
tapestries
.
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During and after
World War II
, he painted an impressive collection of clowns, most of them virtual self-portraits. He also executed some
still lifes
with flowers; these are exceptional, for three-quarters of his lifetime output is devoted to the
human
figure. In 1947 he sued the
heirs
of Vollard to recover a large number of works left in their possession after the death of the art dealer in 1939. Winning the suit, he established the right of an artist to things never offered for sale, and afterward he publicly burned 315 canvases that he felt were not representative of his best work. During the last 10 years of his life, he renewed his palette, adding greens and yellows, and painted some almost mystical landscapes: a good example is
Christian Nocturne
.
Among the major artists of the 20th-century school of
Paris
, Rouault was an isolated figure in at least two respects: he practiced
Expressionism
, a style that has never found much favour in
France
, and he was chiefly a religious painter?one of the most convincing in recent centuries. Both statements, however, need qualification. Rouault was not as fiercely Expressionistic as some of his Scandinavian and German contemporaries; in some ways his work is a late flowering of 19th-century
Realism
and Romanticism. And he was not an official church artist; his concern with sin and redemption was deeply personal.