Jacqueline MARVAL (1866 – 1932) Bathers with flowers

Jacqueline Marval

All is softness, harmony, beauty and tranquility in this pastel-colored work by Jacqueline Marval. The oval shape, synonymous with femininity, underlines the gracefulness of the canvas.

Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 99 x 80 cm

Price : 7500 euros

“One of the most remarkable artists of our time.” Guillaume Apollinaire, l’intransigeant, February 25, 1912

Jacqueline Marval, known for her female nudes.

A nude redheaded woman, a slender, evanescent bather, mingles with the delicate blossoms of a fruit tree in a lakeside landscape. Two doves, beautiful immaculate birds symbolizing purity, love and beauty, are placed at her feet.
Although the scene is dreamlike, we can situate it in the Pays Voironnais (Isère) in the Chartreuse Regional Nature Park, the artist’s home region.

Jacqueline Marval delivers here a work of great tranquility, a dream of gentleness and harmony.

The tranquility of the lake, the softness of the colors, the velvety flowers cascading from the fruit tree, the ethereal whiteness of the woman, the misty sky and the oval shape of the canvas transport us to a world of beauty, grace and harmony.

This canvas is representative of Jacqueline Marval’s talent, freedom and determination to embark on her painting adventure without influences or constraints.

Biography

Jacqueline Marval is a painter from the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century. Born in 1866 to a family of schoolteachers near Grenoble, she came to painting only at a late age. She moved to Paris in 1895 in Montparnasse, at the heart of artistic life at the end of the century. A modest seamstress by trade, she was introduced to painting by her companion Jules Flandrin, a student of Gustave Moreau. He encourages her talent as an observer and colorist. She meets Matisse, Guérin, Laurencin, Camin, Rouault, Marquet and the others.

The artist opens the way to dreams and softness in his poetic compositions, like dreamlike projections of the mind.

Her paintings were refused at the Salon of 1900, she only exhibited there the following year. At that time, genius collectors and gallery owners Berthe Weill, Ambroise Vollard and Eugène Druet bought and exhibited his work. In February 1902, Jacqueline Marval exhibited alongside Matisse, Marquet, and his companion Flandrin at Berthe Weill, 25 rue Victor Massé. From then on, she took off and exhibited internationally, in Europe, the United States and Asia.

The spontaneous and generous art of the artist is praised and recognized by his peers. During a visit to the studio of the painter Lucien Mainssieux, Matisse was astonished by the power of the Odalisques, preserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble. In a 1905 correspondence with the artist, Marquet and Manguin pay “the tribute of good taste to genius”.

The economic crises chained the galleries, reduced to exhibiting the few painters that the first war did not take away in addition to the new artists of the beginning of the century. The artist died in poverty and indifference, in the same room of the Bichat hospital as Paul Verlaine. His paintings were dispersed after the closure of the Druet Gallery in 1938.

Today, art historians and collectors are seeing a renewed interest in this free-spirited artist from the turn of the centuries. His poetic and colorful universe invites itself in the interiors of our contemporaries as well as in museums such as the Petit Palais in Paris and provincial museums such as the museum of Grenoble.

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