Friday, March 6, 2020

L'Artiste a vingt ans environ - self-portrait by Gabriel Deluc, circa 1902-04



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Jean-Marie Gabriel Deluc (1 October 1883, Saint-Jean-de-Luz - 15 September 1916, Souain-Perthes-lès-Hurlus), French painter. Born in the Basses-Pyrénées, he showed great artistic promise at an early age. He was noticed by artist Léon Bonnat and enrolled in Bayonne's municipal drawing school when he was fifteen; two years later, he was admitted to Bonnat's studio in Paris and received as a pupil at the École nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1903. From 1904 to 1912 he lived in Paris, at first struggling, but in 1906 he showed at the Salon for the first time and was awarded an honorable mention. He would continue to show regularly at the Salon and then at the Salon des indépendants. He married in 1913 and the following year, at the beginning of the war, he enlisted, first as a medic. But in the second year of the war he joined the combat troops, where he quickly rose to the rank of sergeant, and was then promoted to the rank of second lieutenant in June of 1916. Three months later he was killed during a reconnaissance mission in no man's land. "Tué à l'ennemi", he was thirty-three. Today he is best remembered as the dedicatee of the third piece - Forlane - in Maurice Ravel's piano suite of 1918, Le Tombeau de Couperin.

Auto-portrait, 1900. The artist was sixteen.
The cover of the first edition, designed by the composer, himself.

"Forlane" from Le Tombeau de Couperin, played by Katrīna Kroja.




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