ARTIST: Karl Xavier Roussel (French, 1867 - 1944)
NAME: Les Baigneuses
MEDIUM: pastel on paper. Paper applied to board.
CONDITION: Normal wear. Minor staining (upper right corner). Some age toning.
SIGHT SIZE: 10 x 12 inches / 25 x 30 cm
BOARD SIZE: 14 x 17 inches / 35 x 43 cm
SIGNATURE: lower right
PROVENANCE: Sears - Vincent Price collection (has labels on verso)
NAME VARIANTS: Ker Xavier Roussel
Gaston Chaissac, Man Ray
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
SKU#: 116976
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BIOGRAPHY:
Ker-Xavier Roussel was a French painter associated with Les Nabis.
Born Francois Xavier Roussel in Lorry-les-Metz, Moselle in 1867, at age fifteen he studied at the Lycee Condorcet in Paris; alongside his friend Edouard Vuillard, he also studied at the studio of painter Diogene Maillart. In 1888, he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and soon began frequenting the Academie
Julian where Maurice Denis and other students formed the group Les Nabis.
He is best known for paintings of French landscapes usually depicting women, children, nymphs, and fauns in bucolic settings. In 1899, Roussel, Vuillard, and his another close friend, Pierre Bonnard, traveled to Lake Como, Venice, and Milan.
Roussel is mentioned in Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Chapter 3. There she recounts an exchange he had with Theodore Duret in Vollard's shop at an uncertain date after 1904. Roussel complained of the lack of recognition that he and the other Nabi painters had to contend with. Duret
consoled him by pointing out his incompatibility with the manners and fashions of the bourgeois world and the differences between "art" and "official art".
In 1926, Ker-Xavier Roussel won the Carnegie Prize for art.
Ker-Xavier Roussel died in 1944 at his home in L'Etang-la-Ville, Yvelines.