Maurice Asselin

He also worked as a book illustrator, particularly in the 1920s. His personal style was characterised by subdued colours, sensitive brushwork and a strong sense of composition and design. He was awarded the rank of Officier de la Légion d'honneur in 1939.

Maurice Asselin studied at Beaux-Arts de Paris. Training under Fernand Cormon is recorded. The recorded working language is French. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are still life and portrait. Residence is recorded at rue Lamarck and rue Caulaincourt. Work by Maurice Asselin is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK), Musée d'art et d'histoire de Saint-Brieuc, Fitzwilliam Museum and Ackland Art Museum. Distinctions recorded are Officer of the Legion of Honour.

• Name — Maurice Paul Jean Asselin • Born — 24 June 1882 • Birthplace — Orléans, France • Died — 27 September 1947 • Place of death — Neuilly-sur-Seine, France • Education — École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris • Known for — Painting, engraving • Movement — School of Paris • Spouse — Paton • Children — Bernard, Jean, Georges • Awards — Officier de la Légion d'honneur

Maurice Asselin was born on 24 June 1882 in Orléans. His father was a coachman, and his mother ran the tobacco shop La Pipe d'or at the corner of rue Sainte-Catherine and rue Jeanne-d'Arc, before they took over a restaurant called L'Auberge de la rue Sainte-Catherine. After studying design and painting at the Collège Sainte-Croix in Orléans, which ended in his graduating second class, in 1899 he began as an apprentice working with calico in the fabric house Aux Travailleurs at place de la République in Orléans, and then in 1900 in a textile house in the Sentier district of Paris. Described as a half-hearted and "distracted employee", he returned to spend the years 1901–1903 in Orléans, his father having died in 1902. In his sketchbook, from which he was never separated from childhood, he captured views of Orléans, Tigy, Saint-Hilaire-Saint-Mesmin, before returning to Paris where he was a student of Fernand Cormon at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts). The academic teaching, which he disliked, was compensated by in-depth observation of Paul Cézanne and the Impressionists at the Musée du Luxembourg and the Louvre. This was interrupted by the onset of tuberculosis, which he probably acquired in the badly heated rooms he occupied in the attics of the 15th arrondissement, leading to his hospitalisation in an Auvergne sanatorium.

• Illustration — The Italian village of Anticoli Corrado, which Maurice Asselin loved. • Illustration — A Brittany landscape, between Moëlan-sur-Mer and Riec-sur-Bélon. Maurice Asselin first visited Brittany in 1905, where he met the painter Jacques Vaillant at Moëlan-sur-Mer. He returned there in 1906 and 1907. After his first showings at Parisian exhibitions (the Salon des indépendants in 1906, and the Salon d'automne in 1907, of which he became a member and member of the jury in 1910), he left for Italy where, from May to October 1908, he bicycled from Rome to Florence, spending time in Anticoli Corrado, Assisi, and Siena. Asselin returned to Italy in 1910 where from Genoa he went to Naples, spent time in Rome, and finally rented a small studio in Anticoli Corrado throughout the summer, where his first works were completed on the theme of the nude. Asselin first met the writer Pierre Mac Orlan in 1910 in Moëlan-sur-Mer, and this was followed by a long friendship. Mac Orlan wrote in his memoirs of the summer activities of Maurice Asselin and his painter friends Ricardo Florès, Émile Jourdan and Jacques Vaillant in Brigneau-en-Moëlan at La mère Bacon, "a small fishing inn perched on a rock, located at the entrance to the jetty, which it overlooked". "Maurice Asselin brings delicate watercolours back from Concarneau every summer," confirmed another friend of the artist, the novelist Roland Dorgelès. Returning to Paris, Asselin lived from 1911 at 39, rue Lamarck. Asselin, Mac Orlan, Roland Dorgelès and many other residents of Montmartre including Francis Carco and Maurice Sauvayre enjoyed colourful Sunday outings to the Auberge de l'Œuf dur et du Commerce in Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin. On 31 July 1914, back in the south of France in Finistère, Asselin, Vaillant and Mac Orlan heard of France's entry into the First World War, heralded by the tocsin bell.

In 1912 the art critic André Salmon described Maurice Asselin as "one of the young painters most likely to succeed." That year also saw the first of the artist's many trips to London, with his first solo exhibition being held there in February 1913. Between 1914 and 1916 he was Walter Sickert’s closest friend, for a time sharing the latter's apartment in Red Lion Square. In the monthly column that Sickert wrote in The Burlington Magazine at the time, in December 1915 he made a comparative study of the paintings of Asselin and Roger Fry, which concluded Asselin's superiority. Each of the two artists painted the portrait of the other; the portrait of Asselin painted in 1915 by Sickert is now in the collections of the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, while Asselin kept his "Portrait of Walter Sickert" at his home in Montmartre and later in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Asselin also spent time in 1915 in Ashford with another painter friend, Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro. On his return to Paris, he lived from 1916 at 121, rue de Caulaincourt in the 18th arrondissement.

At the instigation of General Niox, director of the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, a decree of 8 November 1916 declared that "the Under-Secretary of State for Fine Arts, with the authorisation of the Minister of War, may entrust to artists assignments with the armies". A committee which included art historian and curator Léonce Bénédite, and art critics François Thiébault-Sisson and Arsène Alexandre was put in charge of selecting artists not mobilised, stipulating that their purpose was "the painting of real history", rather than idealistic, symbolic or patriotic imagery. The "modern" painters thus selected, exhibitors at the Salon d'automne and the Salon des indépendants, ranged from the former nabis (Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Maurice Denis) to the "new post-Cézanne landscape painters" who at the time included Maurice Asselin, Louis Charlot, Henri Lebasque, Henri Ottmann, Gaston Prunier, and Jules-Émile Zingg, and were commissioned in this way to document history which was not yet written. The presence of Asselin's work in the collections of the Musée de l’Armée shows his commitment to the "Artists’ Missions to the Armies in 1917".

Maurice Asselin married Paton on 17 September 1919, a marriage which produced three sons, Bernard in 1922, Jean in 1923 and Georges in 1925, and introduced the theme of motherhood into his work. He returned to Brittany in the 1920s and found Pierre Mac Orlan, Jacques Vaillant and Pierre-Eugène Clairin there, with the group taking up residence at the Hôtel de la Poste run by the wife of the painter Ernest Correlleau in Pont-Aven. In 1925, in the company of the painter André Fraye, he travelled along the Mediterranean coast (Marseille, Sainte-Maxime, Saint-Tropez), in the Var (Le Luc) and in the Vaucluse (Avignon, Orange). That same year, Asselin left Montmartre to settle at 45–47, rue du Bois-de-Boulogne in Neuilly-sur-Seine, in the residence-workshop whose design and construction he entrusted to the architect and designer Pierre Patout. Asselin returned to southern France in 1927 with Paton and their three sons. In the 1930s (his mother died in Orléans in 1932) saw him again in Brittany: Concarneau in 1930, Douarnenez in 1931, Beuzec-Conq in 1932, Pont-Aven until 1938, Kerdruc in 1939, all in an entourage made up of painters Pierre-Eugène Clairin, Émile Compard, Ernest Correleau, Fernand Dauchot, Émile Jourdan, Jean Puy, René Thomsen, and with literary friends too: Pierre Mac Orlan, always, but also Max Jacob or Liam O'Flaherty whose portrait Asselin painted. The exoduses of the Second World War led Asselin and his family to Chalonnes-sur-Loire until the armistice of 22 June 1940 between France and Nazi Germany. Both psychological suffering (Asselin resented defeat and the Occupation) and physical pain (osteoarthritis in his hip made walking difficult) are felt in his painting, a period of "red nudes" and small bunches of flowers. "His palette is hardening" noted his son Georges Asselin.

In 1945, he went to Brittany to stay with the Correleaus at the Hôtel de la Poste in Pont-Aven, for the last time. He was admitted to Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris in 1947, was operated on by Professor Bergeret on Monday 22 September and died on Saturday 27 September.

• Officer of the Legion of Honour • Member of the Académie des gastronomes, founder: Curnonsky

Art historian and critic Bernard Dorival described Maurice Asselin, along with Edmond Ceria, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Charles Dufresne, Paul-Élie Gernez, Louise Hervieu, Maurice Loutreuil and Henry de Waroquier as painters of the "realist reaction" who "prefer the frank realism of the Impressionists and the sincerity with which they questioned nature" to "the idealism and to the photographic realism" of the academic tradition of the 19th century." “Against the unrealism of the Cubists, they pose as heirs to the independent masters of the third quarter of the 19th century, primarily Gustave Courbet, the spiritual father of their movement". Dorival supported his argument by quoting Asselin: "if you really love painting, you will not only ask it to be a decoration for the walls of your home, but first of all to be food for your interior life.” Asselin continued: “no cerebral combination, no theory can give birth to a work of art… Art springs from the amazed love of life.”

“A beautiful work must, by its arrangement, its rhythm, the choice of the elements which compose it, satisfy the refined man, and, by the impression of life which it releases, move the simplest man." – Maurice Asselin

• Illustration — Bouquet d'œillets (Bouquet of Carnations) (1908) • Illustration — Maternité (Motherhood) (1923) • Illustration — Femme à la couture (Woman Sewing) (1924) • Illustration — Portrait du professeur Branly (Portrait of Professor Branly) (1936) Musée Toulouse-Lautrec • Illustration — Nu allongé (Reclining nude) (1938) • Illustration — Maternité (Motherhood) • Illustration — Jeune fille lisant (Young Girl Reading) • Illustration — Pensées dans un vase (Thoughts in a Vase) • Illustration — Vue de jardin (Garden View) • Illustration — Femme nue debout (Nude Woman Standing) Musée Toulouse-Lautrec • Illustration — Femme assoupie le buste nu (Drowsy Woman with Nude Bust)

• Galerie Eugène Blot, Paris, February 1909, December 1911, November 1916 • Galerie Devambez, 1911 • Museum of Copenhagen, 1911 • Galerie Druet, 20, Rue Royale, Paris, 1911, November 1917, December 1918, March 1923, February 1924, 1930 • Galerie Levesque, Paris, 1911 • Carfax & Co, London, February 1913, November 1915 • Galerie Vildrac, Paris, April 1914 • Galerie Georges Pesson, Paris, November 1919 • Galerie Marcel Bernheim, May 1921, November–December 1925, May 1933, May 1937, 1939 • Maurice Asselin – Rétrospective, Galerie Georges Bernheim, Paris, May 1928, May 1930 • American Women's Club, Paris, 1935 • Cent toiles et aquarelles de Maurice Asselin, Tokyo, 1935 • Galerie Charpentier, Paris, May 1935, 1943 (Cent aquarelles d'Asselin), 1945. • Galerie Saluden, Brest, 1936 • Galerie Roger Dequoy, Paris, 1941 • Galerie Jacques Dubourg, Paris, 1943 • Galerie André Maurice, Paris, June–July 1950, 1953, December 1954 – January 1955, October 1957 (rétrospective, dixième anniversaire du décès de l'artiste) • Galerie René Drouet, Paris, March–April 1961 • Galerie Nichido, Tokyo, 1969 • Galerie Schmidt, Paris, February–March 1970 • Hommage à Maurice Asselin – Soixante-dix toiles, aquarelles et dessins (Tribute to Maurice Asselin – Seventy paintings, watercolours and drawings), Galerie Daniel Péron, Pont-Aven, July–September 1983 • Maurice Asselin et la Bretagne, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pont-Aven, April–June 2002

• Salon des indépendants, Paris, from 1906 • Salon d'automne, Paris, from 1907 to 1942 (illustration de la couverture du catalogue en 1936). • Salon des Tuileries, Paris, 1909, 1944 • Maurice Asselin, Charles Camoin, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Moderne Galerie, Munich, 1909 • Maurice Asselin, Lucien Mainssieux, Claude Rameau, Galerie Druet, Paris, 1913 • Exposition de l'Association des artistes de Hambourg, Hamburg, November–December 1919 • La jeune peinture française – Maurice Asselin, Roger Bissière, Louis Charlot, André Derain, Charles Dufresne, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Jean Fernand-Trochain, Othon Friesz, André Lhote, Robert Lotiron, Maurice Utrillo, Henry de Waroquier… (Young French Painting...), Galerie Manzi-Joyant, Paris, June–July 1920 • Le premier groupe – Maurice Asselin, Albert Marquet… (The First Group...), Galerie Marcel Bernheim, 1920 • Exposition "Petites Tuileries" – Quarante peintres de l'École de Paris: Maurice Asselin, André Bauchant, Charles Kvapil, Henri Lebasque, Mela Muter, Anders Osterlind, Valentine Prax, Jean Puy, Jean Souverbie, Pierre Tal-Coat, René Thomsen, Dallas Public Art Gallery, Dallas, Texas, March–April 1932 • Exposition du Onzième groupe des artistes de ce temps: Maurice Asselin, Charles Camoin, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, Jean Puy, Petit Palais, Paris, December 1935 – January 1936 • Ausstellung Französischer Kunst den Gegenwart (Exhibition of Contemporary French Art), Preussische Akademie der Künste, Berlin, June 1937 • Le quatrième Salon de Mai à Orléans, Musée des beaux-arts d'Orléans, 1948 • Undated exhibition: Maurice Asselin (peintures) et Louis Dejean (sculptures), Galerie Pigalle, Paris • Marius Borgeaud ou la magie de l'instant ('Marius Borgeaud or the magic of the moment), Fondation Gianadda, Martigny (Switzerland), November 2001 – January 2002 • Les peintres graveurs et la mer (Painters, Engravers and the Sea), Espace Mélanie, Riec-sur-Bélon, August 2007 • De Gauguin à Marcel Gromaire, la naissance d'un musée (From Gauguin to Marcel Gromaire, the birth of a museum), Musée de Pont-Aven, August–September 2012. • Boire aux Champs libres (Drinking in the Open Fields), Rennes, November 2015 – April 2016

• Delorme et Collin du Bocage, auctioneers, Vente de l'atelier Maurice Asselin (Sale of the Maurice Asselin Workshop), salle des ventes du 9, rue de Provence, Paris, 9 March 2017

Maurice Asselin is recorded as having received Officer of the Legion of Honour.

List is not exhaustive; in alphabetic order of location. • Algeria • Algiers, National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers: cabinet of prints and engravings • Belgium • Ghent, Museum of Fine Arts • Denmark • Copenhagen, National Gallery of Denmark, four paintings from the Rump collection • France • Aix-les-Bains, Faure Museum Modèle nu au fauteuil (Nude model in chair) • Albi, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec • Portrait of Édouard Branly, 1936 • Femme nue debout (Nude woman standing) • Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Musée Albert-André Rue de Tournon in Paris • Brest, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest Le repos du modèle (Model at rest), oil on canvas, 72.8 x 59.8 cm • Cambrai, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Cambrai: Le Café dans le jardin (Coffee in the Garden) • Grenoble, Museum of Grenoble Portrait of Jean Pellerin in Keriolet, 1920 • Guéret, Museum of the Sénatorerie: Jeune femme au piano (Young Woman at the Piano), 1927 • Lyon, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon • Nanterre, The Contemporary: Mobilisation • Nantes, Musée d'Arts de Nantes Maternité (Motherhood), 1923, oil on canvas • Orléans, Musée des beaux-arts d'Orléans Nu allongé (Reclining nude), 1912 • Paris • Bibliothèque nationale de France Portraits of Maurice Farina • Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (France) Concarneau Basin • Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris At the Glénans, about 1932–1935, watercolour • Musée National d'Art Moderne • Le Café dans le jardin (Coffee in the Garden), 1922 • Checy, 1927 • L'Arven de Rosbraz, 1938, watercolour • L'Arc de triomphe du Carrousel, 1938 • Péronne, Alfred Danicourt Museum • Pont-Aven, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pont-Aven • Self-portrait • La Jetée de Brigneau (The Pier of Brigneau) • Rennes, Museum of Fine Arts of Rennes Vue de Île Raguenès (View of Île Raguenès), 1906, charcoal and watercolour • Saint-Brieuc, town hall Curnonsky en Bretagne (Curnonsky in Brittany), loan from the National Foundation for Contemporary Art • Versailles, Musée Lambinet Barques au port (Boats in port), watercolour • Location unknown Curnonsky à la table de Mélanie Rouat (Curnonsky at Mélanie Rouat's Table), 1927, oil on canvas, formerly in Paris at the Musée du Luxembourg • Luxembourg • National Museum of History and Art, Luxembourg City • Netherlands • Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum • The Hague, Kunstmuseum Den Haag • New Zealand • Christchurch, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu • Russia • Moscow, Pushkin Museum • Switzerland • Geneva, Petit Palais Museum • Les Péniches (The Barges), 1913, oil on canvas • Jeune femme se dénudant (Young Woman Undressing), about 1927, oil on canvas; • Cambridge, University of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum Bateaux (Boats) • Cheltenham, The Wilson (Cheltenham) Deux jeunes filles lisant (Two Girls Reading), oil on canvas • Leeds, Leeds City Museum • London, British Museum • Manchester Whitworth Art Gallery • Wakefield, The Hepworth Wakefield Anemones, oil on canvas; • Boston, Museum of Fine Arts • Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art • New York City • Brooklyn Museum • Museum of Modern Art Maternité (Motherhood), lithograph

• Former collection of Pierre Mac Orlan, location unknown • Former collection of Marius Borgeaud, Portrait de Marius Borgeaud, location unknown • Former collection of Georges Renand – Jeannine et Édouard Chapet, Berge de la Seine, aquarelle.