Jean-Gabriel DOMERGUE

Jean-Gabriel DOMERGUE studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris with an impressive number of professors of the time: Jules Lefebvre , Tony Robert-Fleury , Jules Adler , Fernand Humbert , François Flameng . At first, Jean-Gabriel DOMERGUE seemed destined for a career as a landscape painter, but he soon became a painter of nudes and semi-nudes, with a moderate aggressiveness and mischievous coquetry that made his reputation and fortune among a bourgeois clientele more polite than liberated, whose ultimate audacity consisted in sending their wives for portraits; Whoever she was, the portrait, executed with suspicious virtuosity, revealed her to be slender, as if stretched, her bust thrust forward in a bidding motion, her ample bosom inadvertently slightly revealed, her loins arched in a tight-fitting gown, a swan's neck surmounted by a face adorned with make-up, a mischievous nose, a passe-partout Parisienne, somewhere between showy elegance and hidden vulgarity. Jean-Gabriel DOMERGUE exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français as early as 1906, at the age of 17, suggesting a precocious skill that has not been denied in his work. Jean-Gabriel DOMERGUE won a gold medal in 1920, and in 1927 moved to a sumptuous villa in the hills above Cannes.