Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Jules Emile Elisee Maclet was the son of a gardener who lived in Lyons-en Santerre in Picardy. He was born there on 12 April 1881. Since his family was poor, he began to work at an early age, as an assistant to his father. His father was not only a gardener, but also the sexton in the village church, so the boy inevitably became a choirboy. Boy’s apparent talent brought him to the attention of the local cure, Father Delval who was his first art teacher.

In 1892, Puvis de Chavannes saw some of the works of the twelve-year-old boy and was so impressed that he sought out the Maclet’s father and asked that he allow the boy to study with him but the father didn’t agree. In spite of paternal opposition, Elysee Maclet gave up gardening for art.

Going to Montmartre, however, did not mean immediate fame. He had to occupy various employments to ensure the ordinary one, such as accessories supplier of theatre, cook and even plunger in various cabarets of the time.

When Maclet arrived in Montmartre, much of the country charm of the area still existed and he put it on canvas, even before Utrillo did so. Biographers have rather tented to pass over in silence the services Maclet rendered to Utrillo. Maclet knew practically all the future great painters of his time, Utrillo among them and it is certain that he aided the star-crossed genius, though his own reluctance to have people write about him may account for the fact that we know of it only through oblique remarks in the records of the time. Maclet painted the “Lapin Agile” and the “Moulin de la Galette” and the ‘Maison de Mimi Pinson” several years before Utrillo did paint them. He painted most often in winter and in this period, skilfully suggesting the snow by leaving bare white spaces in his canvas or paper.

In a short time Maclet won a circle of sincere admirers. The art dealer Dosbourg bought his work, which gave him a fairy reliable source of income and enabled him to devote more time than ever to his painting. From Montmartre he launched out into the suburbs of Paris, painting them with the same indulgent tenderness with which he treated the scenes of Montmartre.

When war broke out in 1914, Maclet served as a medical attendant in a temporary hospital run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. That allowed him to spend his periods of leave back in Montmartre, where he stayed at the ‘Lapin Agile” thanks to the hospitality of his friend Frede. Maclet slept in the cabaret hall and paid for his food by washing dishes and polishing the copper pots. On one of these leaves, he painted two small pictures of Sacre-Coeur and the Moulin de la Galette which he sold to a Mr. Deibler, who combined his profession of official executioner with a love of the fine arts. Mr. Deibler was not his only patron and admirer. Francis Carco, the mayor of Montmartre, the famous writer Colette and the American art dealer Hugo Perlsall regarded him as the equal of the other great painters of the period. Famous dealers of the time, such as Pierre Menant and Matho Kleimann-Boch hung Maclet’s work beside the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso in their galleries.

When the war ended, Maclet went back to Montmartre to live. In 1918 Francis Carco felt the painter needed to widen his horizons and sent him to Dieppe to stay in a house which Carco rented on a yearly basis. Soon all the wealth of the seacoast scenes appeared on Maclet’s canvases. He spent a year in Dieppe and then returned to Montmartre and to his former subjects.

In 1923 Maclet entered into a contact with a wealthy Austrian manufacturer, Baron Von Fray. One of the conditions of his contract was that he leaves Paris for the south of France. Baron Von Frey sensed that Maclet would know how to handle the brilliant light and intense colours of the Midi. Maclet stayed in the region from 1924 to 1928. He painted in Orange, Vaison-La Romaine, La Ciotat, Cassis, Golfe Juan, Antibes, Cagnes, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Ville-Franche, Nice, Menton, San Remo, sending back to Von Frey glowing landscapes and glorious floral still lives. Von Frey reserved for himself almost the total output of this period and sent most of them to America, where wealthy collectors vied to buy them at high prices.

Many magazines devoted articles to Maclet, and an exhibition of his work was presented in Paris in 1928. Von Frey also had the satisfaction of seeing paintings by Maclet purchased by important museums. But like some years later when the museums of Lyons, Grenoble, and Monte Carlo purchased his work.

At the end of 1928, Maclet went to paint in Corsica. He spent 1929 and 1930 in Brittany and then went back to paint in his native Picardy. In the middle of 1933 he fell seriously ill and was institutionalized for mental difficulties from which he never completely recovered.

After 1935 he resumed his studies of Paris and in 1945 presented a large exhibition of his work under the title ”Around the Moulin”. In 1957 a Parisian gallery organized a retrospective exhibition of Maclet’s work, and the solid rise in the prices of Maclet’s paintings dates from that time. When Maclet made sporadic visits to Paris during his years in the Midi, the painters of Montmartre and Montparnasse considered him a painter on the rise but the general public in France did not grasp his importance and value until 1957.

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