Léonard Sarluis 1874-1949

Salomon-Léon Sarluis was born in 1845 into the Jewish community of The Hague, the son of an antiquarian father and a German mother. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in his hometown from 1891 to 1893, he moved to Paris in 1894. Introduced by Armand Point, he gradually integrated into Symbolist circles, admired for his youthful and androgynous beauty, and in February 1896 attended the banquet offered to Émile Verhaeren. Protected by Élemir Bourges, he exhibited that same year at the fifth Salon de la Rose+Croix of Joséphin Péladan. He created the poster alongside Point, provoking scandal by depicting Perseus brandishing the severed, bloodied head of Émile Zola - a stark illustration of the young idealist salon’s battle against naturalism.

Focusing on mythological and biblical subjects, Sarluis’s painting stood out for its singularity and was warmly received by critics, earning admiration even from Degas and Puvis de Chavannes. Under the influence of Point, he developed an art combining a Renaissance- and Pre-Raphaelite-inspired technique with a style at once mysterious and sensuous. In homage to Leonardo da Vinci, Sarluis adopted the first name “Léonard” to emphasize his artistic lineage and produced large-scale Symbolist compositions. Moving within the artistic and literary elite of the movement, he formed friendships with Oscar Wilde and enjoyed a wealthy private clientele, which partly explains the irregularity of his appearances at the Champs-de-Mars salon. Naturalized French during the First World War, he was given a major solo exhibition at Galerie Bernheim in 1919. Remaining faithful to his aesthetic principles, he illustrated Pavloski’s Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension in 1923, and subsequently devoted several years to a “Mystique of the Bible,” a series of 360 paintings, which he unsuccessfully tried to exhibit in Paris in 1926 before finally presenting them at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1928.

The work we present, blending ochre, yellow, and brown in a sophisticated graphic composition primarily executed in charcoal, watercolor, and gouache, perfectly illustrates Sarluis’s distinctive taste for suggestive, mysterious figures. The artist depicts a young man with an evocative gaze, whose delicate and rather androgynous features echo Sarluis’s own visage, posed languidly. In the manner of the Early Netherlandish painters, the figure delicately holds a rose branch in his right hand (a symbol of romantic sentiment), whose thorns, since the Middle Ages, also allude to the crown of Christ, recalling Sarluis’s Rosicrucian past. As often in his work, the figure wears a toga, topped with a Renaissance artist’s cap, set within an architecturally structured space opening onto a distant landscape. The painter draws from multiple sources: the Northern masters for an intensified attention to detail and meticulous precision of line, and the Italian masters for the Mannerist posture. Despite the large format, Sarluis imbues this enigmatic figure with an intimate dimension, achieved in part through the high degree of refinement of his technique.