"loyaltien Choir" - Oil On Canvas, Signed, Dated 1938 - New Caledonia - 73 X 100 Cm

Roland Mascart
"Loyaltien Choir" - Oil On Canvas, Signed, Dated 1938 - (Countersigned on the back) New Caledonia - 73 X 100 cm. Tropical life scene, Island art, Painting 1938, Modernism.

Son of Paul Mascart, born in Duclair on the banks of the Seine (department of Seine-Maritime). Through contact with his father, Roland was introduced to drawing and painting of Norman nature at a very young age. In 1923, he entered the School of Fine Arts in Rouen where he received academic training. He exhibited for the first time in this city in 1925. Other exhibitions followed one another with works whose style aroused the enthusiasm of regional critics, until the family left for Oceania in 1929. The stay in New Caledonia gave him the opportunity to express his talents as a colorist through numerous pastels or oils and to show all the interest he has in the Canaque world. This period is undoubtedly the most fruitful of his career. Returning to mainland France with his parents in 1934, he soon set up his own workshop in Paris and participated in numerous exhibitions giving him the opportunity to show his rich Caledonian production. After the war, he regularly visited Vendée, Dordogne and the south of France. But Roland Mascart still dreams of one day returning to New Caledonia, and he sets off in 1970 with the project of an exhibition in Nouméa of works from the 1930s as well as paintings by his father. A few years later, in 1974-1975, he made a final six-month trip to New Caledonia, an opportunity to once again satisfy his passion for Oceania and to realize numerous works on Grande Terre and the Loyalties.
The painting illustrates an ancestral tradition still alive in Loyalty, polyphonic singing. If we rely on the date of 1938, it may be registered later because it is in a different color from that of the signature, the painting would have been produced after the departure of the Mascart family from Caledonia.