Georges LACOMBE

Versailles 1868 - Alençon 1916

Biography



Active as a painter and sculptor, Georges Lacombe received his first lessons in drawing from his mother Laure, who was a painter and printmaker of some talent. He completed his training as a pupil of Alfred Roll and Henri Gervex at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he met Emile Bernard. Between 1889 and 1897 Lacombe spent his summers at Camaret-sur-Mer, in the Finistère département on the west coast of Brittany, where he encountered a number of artists, including Maxime Maufra, Charles Cottet and Henri Rivière. In 1892 he met Paul Sérusier and soon afterward joined the Nabis; a group of young artists united by a passionate interest in the work of Paul Gauguin and a desire to develop a new, more expressive pictorial language, in which form and colour were as important in their own right as subject matter. The Nabis artists included Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton, among others. Lacombe painted Breton figure scenes and somewhat artificial, stylized seascapes, in which the influence of Japanese landscape prints is evident. Around 1893 Lacombe met Gauguin, and was inspired by his carved wooden sculptures to begin sculpting in wood himself, creating Symbolist works characterized by a naive technique, and soon becoming widely known as ‘Le nabi sculpteur’.

Of independent means, Lacombe did not need to make a living from his art, and seems to have chosen not to sell his work. Nevertheless, he exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, as well as with the Nabis group at the galleries Le Barc de Boutteville and Durand-Ruel, as well as with Ambroise Vollard. He also commissioned mural decorations from both Sérusier and Paul Ranson. Shortly after his marriage in 1897, Lacombe settled in a house called l’Ermitage, in the Écouves forest near Alençon in Normandy. His isolation from the artistic milieu in Paris, as well as his wooded surroundings, had an effect on his style, with his landscapes becoming more naturalistic. In the early years of the 20th century, Lacombe met and came under the influence of Théo van Rysselberghe, and began painting landscapes in a pointillist manner, later moving to a more Impressionistic style. He carried on working as a sculptor in wood, producing several busts of fellow artists which were shown at the Salon d’Automne of 1911.

Lacombe’s reticence in selling his work during his lifetime has meant that, for many years after his death in 1916, at the age of just forty-eight, his oeuvre remained relatively obscure. Apart from a retrospective exhibition of his paintings, drawings and sculptures at a Parisian gallery in 1924, his work was not widely shown in public until a major Nabis exhibition in Paris in 1955. Works by Lacombe are in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and in several provincial French museums, as well as in the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

As a draughtsman, Georges Lacombe’s work was also little known until recently, since most of his drawings were retained by the artist, mounted into thirty-two albums and kept in his studio. These albums remained with the artist’s descendants until 1974, when some of them were broken up and the drawings dispersed.