Edmond Mercy-Jean

Biography

Edmond Mercy-Jean painter French born with Chevry-Cossigny (Seine-et-Marne) in 1858, died in 1936. He was the pupil at the School of the Art schools of Henri Lehmann itself raises Ingres and besides where he will be the congeneric one of Georges Seurat with which he will divide a workshop and undoubtedly the alive models, Seurat will leave several portraits of his/her friend. It will also bind with Alphonse Osbert and Alexandre Séon; it obtained in 1886 a purse of voyage and left for Italy with Henri Martin and Ernest Laurent studied the Primitive ones which reinforces its taste for the old ones and for the decoration. With Seurat it takes part as assistant in the realization of the Bois crowned (Museum of Lyon) of Puvis de Chavannes, whose one will find the influence as in his Sainte Genevieve (Museum of Brest) acquired by the Parisian collector Simon Hayem whose Bastien-Lepage painter will make a beautiful portrait (municipal Museum of Hazebrouck). Near to the literary circles Symbolists, it will carry out a portrait moving by Verlaine at the hospital Broussais , work painted in winter at the time where the poet his Syphilis looked after, testimony of the friendship which will bind the two men since their meeting until the death of the poet in 1896, this one will dedicate a sonnet to the artist for the portrait which it liked, and will remain the following years at the couple. It will be one of the first to answer favorably the Sar Péladan to which it wrote in 1892: " you are the only one in France with being able to speak Esthétique and Art " and it exposes to the first two living rooms of the esthetic Rosicrucian brotherhood.

Its Work

Having shared a Net interest with Seurat and Séon for the chromatic theories and the divisionnism, it practices however a synthetism with the deaf colors, attenuated. Its taste for the fresco and the tapestry with which one often compares his works of this period inclines it to paint without too much of modelled, combining with-dishes with the subtle colors with reasons more décoratifsSon inspiration is delayed on figures of rêveuses women, purified, by the extreme delicacy of the attitudes, the gestures, the installation coiled in the inexpressible pleasure of the confidence, of the secrecy emitted by the rest of the faint bodies, of the entrusted secrecy. In 1896, Gustave Geffroy evoked: its figures a little languissamment painted in erased colorings, revived by a detail, a flower with the blouse or hair, too translucent eyes, enchased like invaluable stones.

Some works in the Museums

the Bathers , oil on fabric, 92x73 cm, Museum of the Art schools of Rouen.
Portrait of the Sculptor Jean Dampt , Paris, Museum of the Small-Palate.
Miss Ella Carmichael, Paris, Museum of the Petit Palais.

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