Georges Roualt

Georges Roualt

Georges Roualt was born in 1971 in Paris, in the basement of a room on the de la Villette where his mother was seeking shelter from the shelling of the National Assembly against the Republican Commune. Roualt's father was a cabinet maker who worked in a piano factory, and his grandfather on his mother's side taught the young Georges a love of painters such as Courbet , Honore Daumier and Edoard Manet. At the age of 14, Roualt became an apprentice at a stained glass workshop while attending classes at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs , where he learned drawing. In 1890 , he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he studied under Elie Delaunay , an academic painter .

Soon after , Roualt became a student of the great Symbolist Gustave Moreau , who gave Roualt a freedom to develop his personal style. Roualt soon became Moreau's favorite pupil , and his first major work , "The Child Jesus Among the Doctors" (1894) , was painted very much in the style of his teacher. The figure of Jesus stands in a halo of light, in sharp contrast to the surrounding figures, much like a Moreau painting . The work earned Roualt the Chenavard prize , and the following year , in pursuit of the Prix de Rome and under the suggestion of Moreau, dropped out of school in order to better focus on his career.

When Moreau died in 1898, Roualt's stye of painting changed dramatically. He abandoned the Symbolist style of Moreau for physiologically tinged portraits of prostitutes, clowns and desperate characters that lived among the working classes. His nudes and prostitutes are particularly alarming in their sense of desperation and sadness , as in "Prostitute at her Mirror" (1906) and "Prostitutes" (1909) , the latter a devastating look at the spiritual ugliness Roualt felt in the subject matter.

Roualt visited the abbey of Liguge in the early 1900's , where the author Joris Karl Huysmans ( who had immortalized Moreau in his novel "Against Nature") was planning to form a commune of Catholic artists ,and after recuperating from an illness, his painting style changed again , this time away from the style and subject matter that , up until 1912, had never included religious figures. He began to paint pictures with thick forms and heavy , dark lines and his medium changed from watercolor and gouache to oils.

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