Georges Menier (19 April 1880, Paris - 1 January 1933, Paris), was the great-grandson of Jean Antoine Brutus Menier, who founded the celebrated chocolate company in 1816. In the following decades, mainly due to the wise implementation of the newest manufacturing technologies, with factories located at Noisiel, twenty miles outside of Paris, they became the premier chocolatiers in France, a position that lasted for more than one hundred years.
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| A preparatory study for the full portrait. Notice that the composition is wider and that the buildings in the background are different. |
The great wealth accumulated by the family business permitted its members many expensive opportunities, such as yachting and horse racing, politics and extravagant real estate; Georges' uncle, Henri Menier, bought the chateau de Chenonceau in 1913. (That same year, Henri died and the estate was inherited by his brother, Georges' father. The following year, with war begun, a military hospital was set up in the château, administered by Georges and his wife, Simonne.)
Boutet de Monvel's portrait - for which there survive several sketches and oil studies - shows the elegantly dressed Menier seated under the chestnut trees in the avenue du Bois de Boulogne. (Only a few years later, the street was renamed avenue Foch, after the French marshal, a hero of WWI.) The final portrait was shown at the Salon d’Automne of 1923.
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| Three landscape studies. |
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| Another preparatory sketch of the subject. |
