Charles Maurin 1856-1914

After an apprenticeship at the municipal School of Drawing in his hometown of Le Puy-en-Velay, Charles Maurin won the Crozatier Prize in 1875, a scholarship that allowed him to study for three years in Paris. He first attended the Académie Julian, where he studied under Rodolphe Julian, Jules Lefevre, and Gustave Boulanger, before joining the workshops of Ernest Hébert and Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1876. A free and curious spirit, connected to Vallotton and the sculptor Rupert Carabin, he quickly moved away from official academic aesthetics, favoring a more intimate painting style nourished by social and humanist concerns.

From 1882 onward, he exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français, but found in the Salon des Indépendants a space of greater freedom more aligned with his artistic explorations. In the 1890s, he gravitated toward a more mysterious and Symbolist style, regularly participating between 1892 and 1897 in Joséphin Péladan’s Salon de la Rose+Croix, as well as at La Libre Esthétique in Brussels.

An anticlerical, fervent republican, and somewhat anarchist, Maurin also frequented Montmartre’s libertarian circles and contributed to Jean Grave’s journal Les Temps nouveaux and La Revue blanche. A recognized printmaker, he produced etchings and lithographs, including the woodcut of Ravachol between the uprights of the guillotine, as well as several sketches of Louise Michel.

Through his Montmartre friend Aristide Bruant, the young painter met Toulouse-Lautrec. Like Lautrec, he devoted himself to depicting the cosmopolitan nightlife of the capital, including cabarets and performance halls on the Butte. At the heart of the avant-garde, he enjoyed a major exhibition in 1893 alongside Lautrec, organized by Maurice Joyant at the Boussod and Valadon gallery, successors of Goupil & Cie. Two years later, Ambroise Vollard hosted his works on his walls.

A prolific artist, Maurin largely withdrew from the artistic scene after 1901. Falling ill in 1906, he died in Grasse on June 8, 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.