Additional information
| Artist | Veber |
|---|---|
| Country | French |
| Region | European |
ArtistVeber, Jean
Artist Years1864-1928
Artist NationalityFrench
TitleAllegory of Music
Year1889
MediumDrawing > Mixed Media
DimensionsSheet: 20 X 15 inches
Description
Black crayon, white and red chalk, signed lower right, executed on bluish-green, textured wove paper. Study for the mural Allegory of the Arts for the Museum in Senlis, 1889, never executed.
Accession NumberRC1604
NotesJean Veber was born in Paris. Trained as a painter, he became an illustrator when his brother Pierre urged him to join the staff of the newspaper Gil Blas. In 1897, his drawing depicting Otto von Bismarck as a butcher of his own people caused a major controversy. Some of his caricatures were also published in L'Assiette au Beurre and Le Rire.
Veber volunteered into service in World War I at fifty years of age. He was intoxicated by poisonous gases and demobilized in the course of 1918.
Jean Veber is quite a peculiar phenomenon which has not yet been deservedly appreciated. On one characteristic ground: because he never understood how to be solemn; because he seems not to take himself or his art seriously. He began as a caricature draughtsman for Boulevard papers, and only when his vocation for this peculiar province was well established, did he exhibit oil-paintings. But he was already labelled, and people continue to regard him merely as a comic draughtsman. Jean Veber was the descendant in the direct line of the younger David Teniers, Adriaen Brouwers, and Hollen-Breughels. From them he derived his full style of painting, his deep, rich colors, his great sureness and luxuriance of execution, his clear composition and florid imagination. He differs, however, from them in the quality of his fancy which delights in symbols replete with philosophical references; frequently in Saadic spectacles of cruelty and lust, and very often in lubricities of Félicien Rops kind. This is the effect of the hundred and fifty to three hundred years which separate him from his more innocent spiritual ancestors.
(source: wikipedia.org)