Emile-Marie Beaume. Street Scene in the Maghreb

Oil on canvas, signed lower left Emile Beaume

French painter, lithographer and engraver, Emile-Marie Beaume was born in Pézenas in 1888. His father, Georges Beaume, was a novelist and art critic. His father's friends, Alphonse Daudet and Pierre Loti, as well as Marshal Lyautey, fed the young boy's imagination with their books and their exploits.

Emile-Marie Beaume studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studios of painters Fernand Cormon, François Flameng and Adolphe Déchenauld.

A talented draughtsman, the artist was assigned to the cartography service of the army when the war broke out in 1914. There he produced plans and topographical surveys.

In 1917, Beaume was mobilized in Morocco by the French army. This trip will profoundly influence his work. In Morocco, Beaume begins to paint street scenes, portraits of inhabitants. Returning to France at the end of the conflict, Emile Beaume continues to paint in this vein, delivering alongside his street scenes, luminous landscapes of the Magreb.

In 1921, Beaume received the Premier Grand Prix de Rome for an oil on canvas entitled "Ensevelissement de Saint Antoine". The artist subsequently became a recognized master of wall decoration and fresco art, carrying out numerous monumental commissions for mansions, casinos and public buildings.

From 1927 to 1932, he taught drawing at the Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins. Beaume continues his travels in North Africa and in the French colonial Empire. During the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931, he decorated part of the Madagascar Pavilion.

In 1937, his panels representing scenes from North Africa were exhibited at the International Exhibition. Winner of the French Equatorial Africa Prize in 1937, he traveled to Oubangui-Chari, Chad and the Belgian Congo. After the Second World War, the artist devoted himself to decorating the palaces of the great Moroccan and Ethiopian families. In 1945, he painted a fresco for the Palace of the Governor of Djibouti. In 1948, in Casablanca, he decorated a villa for the King of Morocco. Émile Marie Beaume died in 1967

Some of his works are kept in the museum of Pézenas, the artist having donated his studio to his hometown.

Museums: Pézenas Museum Chapel of the Old Minor Seminary known as the Chapel of Remembrance, Orne Paintings in the churches of the Holy Spirit, Paris

Bibliography Thornton Lynne, Africanists, traveling painters: 1860-1960, ACR Edition