19th century French painting - The return of the sinners - Oil on canvas signed (MARONIEZ Georges)

Biography

MARONIEZ Georges (1865 / 1933)
Born in Douai in 1865 and died in Paris in 1933, French painter.

Son of an industrialist, sugar manufacturer in Montigny-en-Ostrevent, he showed very early a taste and gifts for drawing and painting. His father encouraged him but also asked him to study law, the profession of artist being little considered at the time. At the end of his studies, he began a career as a magistrate, successively in Boulogne-sur-Mer (1891), Avesnes-sur-Helpe (1894) and Cambrai (1897).
In parallel with the law faculty, he assiduously followed academic courses at the School of Fine Arts in Douai, and in 1880 became a student of Pierre Billet (1837-1922) in Cantin. There he met the painter Adrien Demont (1851-1928), son-in-law of the famous Jules Breton (1827-1906). On the advice of the latter, he presented his first painting at the Salon de Douai, then in 1887 in Paris Soleil couchant in Esquerchin. On vacation in Wissant, he became friends with the couple Adrien Demont - Virginie Breton, with whom he discovered the coastal landscapes. Every summer for several years, around Demont-Breton, he will meet his Douais friends there: Fernand Stievenart, Henri and Marie Duhem, Félix Planquette. This is the time of the Wissant group. We will also talk about the Côte d'Opale school, including painters from Berck who were friends of the Demont-Bretons, one of the most famous being Francis Tattegrain (1852-1915).
Thanks to the presentation and sponsorship of Adrien Demont, Georges Maroniez became a member of the French Artists in 1889. An inventive spirit, curious and practical at the same time, he became interested in photography and invented a first hand-held camera, then a second even simpler one, the Sphynx, devices that he patented in 1891. The shots taken with this portable camera were invaluable to him for capturing seaside scenes: departure and return of the fishermen, unloading of the fish... scenes which he will then reproduce on canvas in the workshop. He also brought back from his numerous trips to the Mediterranean (North Africa, Italy, Palestine, Egypt...) multiple photographs on glass plates.
His creativity is constantly awakened, so he imagines and builds a cinematographic device working with Lumière film and in which the tremor of the images is eliminated, a device which he presented in January 1899 to the Photographic Society of Cambrai. He married Jeanne Dutemple in 1899 in Cambrai; the couple had three daughters, Germaine, Simone and Madeleine. In 1905, the success of his painting and the consequences of the Combes ministry decided him to resign from the judiciary and devote himself entirely to his art. Mobilized in 1914, he was made a knight of the Legion of Honor in July 1918. His workshop was pillaged and his wife deported during the occupation of the North. The Maroniez family settled in Paris in 1919, rue d'Aguesseau. Now inspired especially by Brittany, their paintings are very appreciated in France and abroad; He died of a heart attack in Paris on December 11, 1933. He was buried in the family vault in Cambrai.
As a young teenager, he began painting around Douai while Corot, Millet, Courbet, the great masters of landscape, were dying. Initially a painter of the countryside and rural life, in a naturalist, very classic, even academic style, he then evolved through contact with the Wissant school towards seascapes, more precisely landscapes and seaside scenes. He excelled in this genre to the point of being presented as a painter of the sea, which he rejected. Painter of the languor and anger of the sea, he represents the life of seafarers; in coastal landscapes and port scenes, he strives to capture the daily life of humble fishermen and their families, the arduous work, the courage, the waiting.
He is also the painter of a rural and prosperous republican France after more than 40 years of peace, and of a civilization still poorly mechanized, of horses and sailing boats. A world which will disappear with the First World War: from the 1920s, motor trawlers will eliminate the fleets of fishing sailboats which provided him with so many subjects for paintings. His work is abundant and scattered in France, Europe and North America. He is estimated to have produced more than 800 paintings, to which are added thousands of studies, pochades and preparatory drawings, as well as his numerous photographic shots.

Several works appear in museums in the North, mainly those of Cambrai and Douai.
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