ArtistBottini, George Alfred

Artist Years1874-1907

Artist NationalityFrench

TitleCafe Interior

Yearca. 1900

MediumDrawing > Mixed Media

DimensionsComposition: 4.5 X 5.5 inches

Accession NumberRC1518

NotesGeorges Alfred Bottini was born on rue Pierre-Fontaine in Paris. He was the son of Ludovic Bottini, a hairdresser and Léontine Bazin. He attended primary school on rue Blanche and then quickly left school. Around the age of 18, employed by the restorer Gatti, he developed a passion for ancient techniques and continued his artistic training in the studio of Eugène Cormon. He regularly visited the galleries of the Louvre Museum, admired Titian, Giorgione and became friends with Fabien Launay and Gaston de Pawlowski.

He began to make a name for himself with his landscapes of Brittany and settled on rue Laval where he had Augusta Holmès as a friend. In 1899, an exhibition at the Kleinmann gallery entitled “Balls, bars, theatres and brothels” which brought together 50 of his watercolours, was praised by Jean Lorrain — whose novel La Maison Philibert (1904) he illustrated — and by Gustave Geffroy. This beginning of recognition did not allow him to escape poverty. Tabarant notes that he was constantly harassed by a poverty which gave him little respite and which his disdainful dandyism looked down on from above.

Bottini then worked with Louis Anquetin and Manuel Robbe and had to do his military service in Baccarat in the foot hunters. Significant signs of a venereal disease that he had contracted at the age of 15 were then strongly felt. After a dinner, he suddenly became mad and had to be interned in the Villejuif hospital, where he died on December 16, 1907.

Saint-Georges de Bouhélier , his faithful friend, paid tribute to him in these terms: "At the age of thirty, he had deepened his art to the point that he could express himself with simple brushes in a way as expressive as Edgar Poe did with a pen. What gives Bottini's smallest sketches so much charm is that a mind seems to have drawn them less to imitate reality than to deliver to us the secret of his reverie... He was a man perpetually in search of new forms but also applied to the study of masterpieces and who spent hours meditating on Goya , Watteau , Rembrandt , Velazquez . He used up in such research a reserve of nerves that were too ductile, always vibrating and on which weighed the darkest fatality. He was one of those inspired people to whom everything presents itself as a cause of emotion and artistic work. What would he not have achieved without death! He will remain in the future as an exquisite, curious, deliciously sad little master. His share of glory is certain".

The Petit Palais Museum in Geneva holds many works by Bottini, the best known of which is The Alsatian Woman or the Painter's Fiancée . The Musée d'Orsay holds an oil on canvas, The Woman with a Parrot, and a portrait of the artist, paper on wood.

His most famous watercolours are his bar scenes and his naked women at their toilet. He first drew the naked figures and then dressed them. He is credited with around twenty canvases and around 200 watercolors. He also engraved some etchings and drypoints in color and designed the lithograph for the Plasson cycles. Most of his works were purchased by the expert and gallery owner Édouard Kleinmann as well as by Edmond Sagot .

He also produced drawings and watercolors outside the text for La Maison Philibert by Jean Lorrain and Une heure du matin, les soupeuses by Gustave Coquiot.
(source: wikipedia.org)