Maurice Chabas 1862-1947

Maurice Chabas was a French Symbolist painter, born in Nantes on 21 September 1862 and died in Versailles on 11 December 1947.

He was born into a cultivated family of merchants; his father, an amateur painter in his spare time, actively encouraged the artistic vocations of his two sons, Maurice and Paul. Both enrolled at an early age at the Académie Julian, where Maurice studied under Tony Robert-Fleury as well as William Bouguereau, Gustave Boulanger, and Jules Lefebvre.

Chabas first exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1885, where he continued to present works until 1913. There, he encountered the art of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose style and subject matter would prove influential. He exhibited extensively, notably at the Salon des Amis des Beaux-Arts de Nantes from 1890 to 1907, as well as in various salons devoted to Christian art. A deeply sensitive and mystical artist, Chabas embraced the ideas promoted by Joséphin Péladan and took part in all the Salons de la Rose+Croix between 1892 and 1897. During this period, he met Alphonse Osbert, whose work shares close affinities with his own in both inspiration and technique. He was also a member of the Groupe des Inquiets (later known as the Éclectiques), which exhibited in 1894.

Although still academic in execution, his Symbolist paintings are distinguished by evocative titles expressing a mystical ideal he believed essential to humanity, such as Celsa (Ecstatic Phase) and Mélété (Evening Melody - Sensation of Calm and Contemplation). His growing reputation led to a solo exhibition at the Galerie des Arts Réunis in Paris as early as 1895.

Influenced by Divisionism, Chabas gradually adopted a less classical approach, particularly in his dreamlike landscapes and ethereal skies. From 1900 onward, he lived and worked at 3 Villa Sainte-Foy in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where his studio became a gathering place for intellectual and spiritual figures, including the Catholic writer Léon Bloy; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl; Father Antonin Sertillanges, then secretary of the Revue biblique; the astronomer and spiritualist Camille Flammarion; the Catholic writer Maurice Maeterlinck (future Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, 1911); the physician Charles Richet (future Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine, 1913); and Joséphin Péladan, mystical writer and founder of the Rose+Croix Salons.

From the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Chabas moved toward increasing stylistic simplification, guided by a spiritual and cosmic vision that culminated around 1920 in complete abstraction. He presented these abstract works in Nantes in 1925 and at the Galerie Devambez in Paris, which published a portfolio of lithographs accompanied by his text Vers l’Amour suprême, intended to elevate souls and draw them toward higher states of universal life.

He participated in the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 and the Brussels International Exhibition of 1910. In March 1914, he welcomed Judith Gautier - one of the very few women painters granted special permission to exhibit at the Rose+Croix Salon - to his vast Neuilly studio, where their discussions centered on spiritual matters.

In 1923, Chabas co-founded the Salon des Tuileries alongside Bessie Ellen Davidson and Charles Dufresne. That same year, on 15 June, he attended the luncheon organized by Ambroise Vollard for the first and only Prix des Peintres, awarded to Paul Valéry. The jury included Louise Hervieu, Jacqueline Marval, and Marie Laurencin - the only women among figures such as Besnard, Bonnard, Bourdelle, Chagall, Maurice Denis, Derain, Forain, Gervex, Laprade, Matisse, Picasso, Rouault, Signac, Van Dongen, Vlaminck, and Vuillard.

Chabas became a member of the Salon d’Automne, the Société Idéaliste, and the Société Moderne, and also exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

He remained steadfastly committed to an exalted spiritualism, which he defended as late as 1935 in a letter to the Director of Fine Arts, now preserved in the French National Archives:

“Humanity today needs a higher ideal. We can no longer live in imbalance, which creates disharmony leading to destruction and death. Spirit is needed to give life to matter and to works of art.”

In the final years of his life, Chabas painted almost exclusively religious subjects, rendered in a luminous, vaporous manner approaching abstraction. He gradually withdrew from social life, lived in near isolation, and died on 11 December 1947 at rue de la Paroisse in Versailles, at the age of eighty-five.

A catalogue raisonné of Maurice Chabas’s work was compiled by Madame Myriam Reiss-de-Palma, documenting no fewer than 903 works, 873 of which are illustrated.