Burgos Cathedral - Maurice Chabas (1862-1947)

Maurice Chabas 1862-1947
was born in Nantes in 1862.

The son of a wealthy merchant and painting enthusiast, he was the elder brother of the painter Paul-Émile Chabas.
He entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes and the Académie Julian.
Both students of William Bougereau and Tony Robert-Fleury, they gradually took very different paths.
Paul-Émile developed a more worldly style, focusing on the female figure and the nude.

Mauric first explored a style close to the Pre-Raphaelites, then gradually turned to Symbolist landscapes. It was this second phase that secured Maurice Chabas a number of state purchases.

The journalist and art critic Léon de Saint-Valéry described Maurice Chabas's painting perfectly, and which can be applied to our painting:

"From all these landscapes emanate serenity, peace, like a supreme detachment. Things seem to have lost their materiality.
Their beauty tends towards the desire for absolute beauty, for that which is both harmonious and geometric; their appeasement predisposes to the mental silence necessary to perceive the word hidden beneath appearances".