Jean Picart le Doux - Petit Music de Nuit

Aubusson tapestry "Petit Music de Nuit" after the original composition of Jean Picart le Doux signed at the bottom right and published by the House M.Berthaut monogrammed on the left and with its bolduc, edition number 252

Picart le Doux's cartons devoted to music are very numerous: the genres, the works ("la petite musique de nuit", another title of the work, "les 4 saisons", for example), the composers ("Hommage à Vivaldi", "Hommage à Bach" which will be the subject of a stamp in 1980), the instruments ("Soleil-Lyre", "Harpe des mers"), the mythological figures ("Orpheus"). Most often, these motifs are integrated into a bucolic nature enamelled with birds and butterflies in a decorative vein specific to the artist.

Bibliography:

Marthe Belle-Jouffray, Jean Picart le Doux, Publications filmées d'art et d'histoire, 1966, reproduced n°5

Maurice Bruzeau, Jean Picart le Doux, Murs de soleil, Editions Cercle d'art, 1972, ill. n°59

Cat. Exp. Jean Picart le Doux, tapestries, Musée de Saint-Denis, 1976

Cat. Exp. Jean Picart le Doux, Musée de la Poste, 1980

Born in Paris on 31 January 1902 into a family of artists - his father was the painter Charles Picart le Doux - he studied at the Lycée Condorcet and at the age of sixteen had to learn a trade. At the age of sixteen, he had to learn a trade. At first, the young Picart le Doux turned to bookbinding and typographic techniques, while taking drawing classes in the evening. After working for a while in a bank, then with the publisher Albin Michel, he was technical director at the art publisher Jeanne Walter from 1925 to 1931.

Devoting himself to graphic art, he made a name for himself in the world of advertising and illustration. In 1942, he won the Grand Prix for theatrical posters, having previously exhibited his first works at the Billiet-Worms gallery and at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition.

His meeting with Jean Lurçat in 1939 radically changed his artistic orientation. The latter's efforts to have tapestry recognised as an autonomous artistic genre at a time when "woven paintings" (Braque, Picasso, Rouault, Dufy, etc.) dominated, determined a whole generation. ) determined a whole generation: Picart le Doux but also Saint-Saëns, Lagrange, Wogensky took part in this revival based on the in-depth study of smoothing techniques, the voluntary limitation of the palette to about thirty tones (there were more than 14,000), and the return to a robust stitch (5 threads per centimetre instead of 10). This movement, stimulated by the foundation, in 1947, of the Association des peintres cartonniers de tapisserie, of which Picart le Doux became vice-president, was organised at the time around Lurçat and Denise Majorelle, who opened the La Demeure gallery in Paris in 1950, entirely devoted to tapestry. Strengthened by this patronage, Picart le Doux then began a career as a cardboard painter, after a stay in Aubusson with a master weaver who taught him the basse lisse technique. Towards the end of his career (1961-1971), he became the defender of this return to the old techniques in the context of his teaching at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

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