Alexandre Graverol 1865-1948

Born in 1865, Alexandre Graverol first trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon before moving to Paris to join Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ studio at the Beaux-Arts. Observing the young artist’s early compositions, Puvis immediately recognized his singular talent, which broke with the naturalism of the era: “Graverol,” he said, “you have the intelligence of art.”

Graverol quickly became involved with the Symbolist circles of Paris and Brussels, forging close relationships with numerous artists and writers. Among them, he developed a deep friendship with Paul Verlaine, whom he depicted several times in 1895 during the poet’s stay at the Hôpital Broussais, where Verlaine died in January 1896. One of Graverol’s Symbolist watercolors of Verlaine was later described and reproduced in Frédillo’s engraving in the February 1896 special issue of La Plume dedicated to the poet.

Born into a wealthy family, Graverol cultivated an image of a carefree dandy and aesthete, largely indifferent to material concerns, and thus exhibited only very rarely. A notorious socialite, he attended Nadar’s studio gatherings at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, frequented the Chat Noir with poets Charles Cros and Maurice Rollinat, as well as the chansonnier Léon Xanrof, and was also familiar with the soirées of La Plume, where he met Claude Debussy. Impulsive and passionate by nature, he left Paris shortly after his marriage and settled in Brussels, having squandered his private fortune on card games.

His daughter, the surrealist artist Jane Graverol, born in 1905, painted a complex portrait of her father, emphasizing the occult and esoteric dimensions of his work:

“My father was intelligent and cruel… aristocratic and anarchist, believing in the power of enchantment and telepathy, mystical without religion. He claimed to have seen apparitions of the Virgin in the streets of Paris… He had a keen sense of all that was elevated in artistic research… He had frequented the poetic avant-garde of the late century, that is, the Symbolists.”

Living in Belgium, removed from the artistic scene, Graverol produced works solely for friends, collectors, or bookbinders, crafting illustrations and ex-libris that concealed, beneath elegant lines, his inner unease and singular personality.

The three watercolors presented here can be stylistically linked to the mid-1890s, Graverol’s most symbolist and prolific period. Combining numerous rigorously organized symbols in a highly synthetic style, the first sheet (cat. no. 1) is a true homage to Paul Verlaine. At the center of the allegorical composition, the poet’s face is haloed with stars, like a saintly visage. He is intimately associated with absinthe, his favorite drink, affectionately dubbed “la fée verte” by Verlaine himself. Graverol personifies the drink as a nude woman with flowing green hair and verdant skin, symbolically merging with the poet’s lyre, whose strings spring from her breasts and rise vertically toward the glass of absinthe, placed along the central axis, near the flowering plants from which the drink is derived before maceration and distillation. This imagery partially references Verlaine’s 1870 poem on absinthe, published in La Bonne Chanson:

"In a gray-and-green dress with beehives,
One June day when I was pensive,
She appeared smiling to my eyes
That admired her without fear of snares;

She went, came back, returned, sat, spoke,
Light and grave, ironic, moved:
And I felt in my darkened soul
A joyful reflection of it all;

Her voice, being of delicate music,
Accompanied delightfully
The harmless spirit of her charming chatter
Where the goodness of a heart shines through.

And suddenly, after the semblance
Of a rebellion quickly stifled,
I fell completely under the power
Of the little Fairy
Whom ever since I plead with, trembling."

Having become addicted to absinthe, Verlaine vividly describes how this drink gradually, almost delightfully, took hold of him, giving our watercolor a more tragic symbolic dimension.
In the second sheet, an allegory of the vine alludes to another beloved drink of artists: wine. In the warm glow of a sunset landscape, Graverol depicts a bacchante with pink, nude flesh, framed by long vine plants heavy with grapes. Pressing grapes against her body, the juice flows along her legs, hydrating the soil and forming strange root-like shapes, evoking Georges Lacombe’s contemporary sculptural representation of Isis.

Featuring the same carefully compartmentalized and stylized forms, reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts, the last of our three watercolors depicts four young girls in medieval costumes within an idyllic garden filled with flowers and cypress trees, opening onto a pond where a pair of swans glide serenely. Although absent from the Bible, these white birds were widely celebrated by Symbolist circles as emblems of love and fidelity, drawing on Greco-Roman and Germanic-Scandinavian mythological references. From a merely noble bird, the swan becomes fully royal - so much so that at the dawn of the modern era, in England and in several European countries, it was forbidden for anyone not of royal blood to own one.