Born to a photographer father whose sister was a nun in Montpellier, Jean Dulac entered the Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 1915 under the direction of the Art Nouveau sculptor Jean-Baptiste Larrivé. Students study the basics of the craft by drawing from fragments of plaster casts, busts, statues and decorative ornaments. The young Isère resident won all the first prizes for drawing and sketching. In 1922, Dulac competed for the first time in the Grand Prix de Paris for sculpture with a two-meter-high clay model representing a Christ on the Cross of exceptional quality which earned him a Vermeil Medal. He had to wait until 1924 to win this famous prize which allowed him to continue his studies in the capital, where he entered the studio of Jules Coutan and Paul Landowski. From 1930, he exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Artistes Français and at the Salon d'Automne. From his initial training as a sculptor, he took up painting as a self-taught artist and exhibited in Lyon at the Salon de la Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts, which he later fervently chaired from 1946 until his death. Renowned for his landscape compositions, portraits and still lifes, he excels above all in the study of the female body and is distinguished by the grace and softness emanating from his modern and colorful nudes, often treated with red chalk in a sculptor's style. In 1941, the artist received the order for two bronze bas-reliefs on the Old Testament: Boaz and Ruth and Fruits of the Promised Land in Haute-Savoie, for the church of Vougy near Thonon-les-Bains. . We find in the large dimensions of our charcoal composition, the solidity and scale due to his original training as a sculptor. Singularly different from his pictorial corpus, The Adoration of the Shepherds was exhibited during the artist's retrospective in 1976, organized by the Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts. Thanks to the mastery of a graphic and mystical chiaroscuro, the soft light radiating from the center, symbolizing the presence of the Child, contrasts with the charcoal representation of the shepherds. Following the sparkling and amazed face of Mary, the spectator is invited to feel and perceive the centuries-old incandescence of the Mystery of this Nativity with its incarnate and suggestive iconography.
Bibliography Jean Dulac. Painter – statuary, 1902 – 1968, Ariste, 2001, 191 p.