JEAN GABRIEL DOMERGUE
"CHATEAU DE MADRID"
GOUACHE, SIGNED, TITLED
FRANCE, DATED 1921
12 X 18 INCHES

Jean Gabriel Domergue
1889-1962
Jean-Gabriel Domergue was a French painter specialising in portraits of Parisian women. He was born in Bordeaux and studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. At the young age of seventeen, in 1906, he exhibited at the Salon Des Artistes Francais (the French Artists Exhibition) In 1911, he was a second-prize winner of the Prix de Rome and in 1920 won the gold medal award.
At the beginning of his career, he was recognized for landscape painting, but from the 1920s, he concentrated being the painter of the "Parisian lady" and with many of them being nudes, he later claimed to be "the inventor of the pin-up". Indeed, as an artist Domergue had invented a new type of woman: thin, airy, elegant, with a swanlike neck and wide seductive eyes which gaze upon the world with longing.
He also designed clothes for the couturier Paul Poiret.
From 1955 until 1962 Domergue was the curator of the Musée Jacquemart-André, organising exhibitions of the works of Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Goya and others.
Also, he was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.
Jean-Gabriel Domergue died 16 November 1962 on a Paris sidewalk.
Awards • Knight of the Legion of Honour • Fellow of the Academy of Fine Arts