Fréderic-Auguste Cazals 1865-1941

A central figure of Montmartre in the late nineteenth century, and the son of a seamstress and a tailor from the rue des Innocents, Frédéric-Auguste Cazals was a self-taught artist with a highly distinctive visual language. By turns a writer, songwriter, draftsman, and illustrator, he is best known for the portraits he produced of his companions and friends, among them Paul Verlaine, of whom he made more than one hundred and fifty portraits - most often drawn from life - between 1886 and 1896, the year the poet died at the Broussais hospital. Through Verlaine, Cazals came into contact with the entire circle of Symbolist poets and writers active in the capital. He maintained a correspondence with Stéphane Mallarmé and, in April 1888, founded the journal Le Paris littéraire, which welcomed contributions from figures such as Gustave Kahn, Paul Adam, Édouard Dubus, and Louis Dumur. Cazals himself illustrated several of Verlaine’s books, notably Dédicaces in 1890 and the collection Mes hôpitaux the following year.

From May 1894 onward, he regularly exhibited his drawings and caricatures at the Salon des Cent, and designed the poster for its seventh exhibition, held in December of the same year, playfully staging Paul Verlaine and Jean Moréas engaged in the exercise of art criticism (fig. 1). Although he collaborated extensively with periodicals such as La Halle aux charges, Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, La Plume, Les Hommes du jour, Jugend, and La Revue bleue, his presence on the walls of official exhibitions remained sporadic. He exhibited only twice at the Salon of the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts, in 1899 and 1903, each time presenting a series of drawn portraits of Verlaine. In 1923, he paid a final tribute to his illustrious friend with the publication of Les derniers jours de Paul Verlaine by Mercure de France.

Depicting Jean Moréas - whom he had also met through Verlaine - our drawing demonstrates the sharp satirical insight of Cazals’s pen and brush. Combining India ink and coloured pencil on paper, the artist portrays the famous poet and critic, an incorrigible dandy, standing upright and seen from behind, wearing a top hat and a long coat, holding a cigar in his left hand. The smoke rising from it curiously spells out, in clear letters, the identity of its smoker: “Moréas.” Cazals succeeds in suggesting the poet’s unmistakable silhouette - his large nose, monocle, and prominent Napoleonic black moustache. On closer inspection, the artist mischievously offers a kind of radiographic vision of his friend’s skeleton, transforming the figure into a subtle allegory of death, arriving through criticism to mow down the ambitions of young creators. In a final, truculent touch, he annotates the drawing with a hypothetical quotation attributed to Moréas: “My heart has been an extinguished cigar for quite some time now!…,” whose excesses seem to foreshadow the famous Stances, the collection the poet would publish in 1899.

Although Cazals had given the drawing to his friend, the journalist and novelist Henry Gauthier-Villars, he was evidently attached to it, as he borrowed it back in order to present it at the 13th exhibition of the Salon des Cent in 1895 (cat. no. 28), where there is little doubt it succeeded in amusing its principal subject.