Romijn Art
Middelburg, Zeeland
André Romijn: Capturing the essence of femininity in oil paintings
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Artist: Antoine Calbet (1860-1944)
Antoine Calbet is a realist French painter, engraver, illustrator, lithographer and decorator born in 1860.
Antoine Calbet is one of the major figures of academic realism of the Third Republic.
A faultless journey
It was at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier that Antoine Calbet forged an impeccable technique, in the studio of Édouard-Antoine Marsal (1845-1929). He then easily entered the National School of Fine Arts in the prestigious studio of Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889). He arrived on the Parisian arts scene at a time when the Third Republic was seeking to establish its legitimacy through prestigious pictorial achievements. Noticed by President Fallières, whose friend he became, Antoine Calbet juggled official orders and private requests.
An exemplary success
Antoine Calbet exhibits regularly at the Salon, his first painting being accepted when he was just twenty years old. He won medals there in 1891, 1892 and 1893 and exhibited out of competition in 1899.
For the Universal Exhibition of 1900, he executed a panel for the Colonial Pavilion and received a silver medal.
He signs many prestigious decorations, the ceiling of the Decourneau Theater in Agen, wall decorations of the Town Hall of Pamiers, Agen, etc. In Paris we admire in the restaurant of the Gare de Lyon, the Train Bleu, its evocations of Nice, Evian, Nîmes and Grenoble.
The Painter of Happiness.
Antoine Calbet's painting restores the positive atmosphere that marks the success of the Third Republic, which endures despite the horrors of the Great War. His subjects are light, euphoric, his women exquisitely beautiful, his official portraits imposing. He excels in gallant scenes, the evocation of an idyllic past à la Watteau, or the exaltation of a grandiose nature.
Antoine Calbet died in 1942.
You can see the works of Antoine Calbet in French public collections, Musée d'Orsay, Musée du Petit Palais, as well as at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Agen, at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, etc. not to mention town halls and theatres. In the USA, it is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art.
A pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and Emile-François Michel, Antoine Calbet also studied with the genre painter Edouard Antoine Marsal. He made his public exhibition debut at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in 1880, and continued to take part in the Paris Salons until 1940. A gifted watercolourist as well as a portrait and genre painter, Calbet had a particular penchant for studies of languid female nudes. He also worked as a decorative painter, counting among his public commissions the decoration of several theatres, as well as the buffet restaurant in the Gare de Lyon in Paris and the restaurant La Grande Taverne in Dijon, for which he painted a Scène de Brasserie.
Antoine Calbet is perhaps known today, however, for his book illustrations, having taken over the commissions of the Czech artist Ludek Marold when the latter returned to Prague. Among the works illustrated by Calbet were editions of Emile Zola’s Madame Neigeon, Guy de Maupaussant’s Bel ami, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Paul Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes. He also provided illustrations for magazine short stories, such as Henri de Régnier’s Le veuvage de Shéhérazade, published in the Christmas 1925 issue of L’Illustration. An exhibition of Calbet’s drawings and watercolours was held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1909, and another at the Galerie Graat in Paris in 1932.
André Romijn
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