Lucien Victor Guirand de Scevola 1871-1950

Although he enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, both in France and abroad, the painter Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola remains unjustly little known to the general public. While some of his works continue to appear regularly in major exhibitions devoted  to the Symbolist movement, the artist has not been the subject of any retrospective since his death in 1950 and remains relatively underrepresented in public collections.

Born in 1871 in Sète, in the Hérault region, into a family of wine merchants, Scévola was sent to Paris at a young age to attend the Lycée Colbert. Pushed by his father, who wanted him to receive a solid training as a businessman, he initially joined a major industrial firm in Paris. However, wishing to devote himself fully to painting, he soon resigned and entered the studio of the painter Pierre Dupuis, and later that of Fernand Cormon at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1889, the young artist soon specialized in fashionable portraiture, which brought him enduring success, and by 1894 he was presenting works that demonstrated his strong interest in the emerging Symbolist aesthetic appearing on the walls of contemporary exhibitions. This brief idealistic phase of Scévola’s career, now highly regarded, is characterized primarily by depictions of female faces set in a medieval atmosphere, evoking the princesses and witches of bygone times. His solid academic training did not prevent him from exploring this new aesthetic through numerous graphic experiments, contributing to the breakdown of traditional boundaries between techniques in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

In addition to pastel, which allowed for a more diffuse expression of form and color, Scévola favored watercolor for his Symbolist works, as evidenced by the pieces he exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle: Adoration, Sœurs, and Vierge (nos. 970, 971, and 972, Group II, Class 7).

By the early twentieth century, Scévola had become a fashionable portraitist. From 1902, he left the Salon des Artistes Français for the more liberal Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and held important solo exhibitions, notably at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1903, in Buenos Aires in 1912, and at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1923. While his successes were widely recognized by contemporary critics, some deemed them somewhat worldly; this did not prevent him from participating repeatedly in more avant-garde events, such as the Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in 1905 and 1906, where his work, still idealistic in spirit, was once again highly praised.

Made an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1914, and regarded as one of the inventors of military camouflage alongside Jean-Louis Forain during World War I, Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola gradually abandoned the Symbolist aesthetic, which had fallen out of fashion, and turned to a somewhat more classical production, mainly consisting of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. He achieved relative success at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, of which he became president in 1937, before passing away in his Paris apartment on 29 March 1950.