Still Life By Maurice Mourlot (1906-1983)

Still life with bouquets of flowers and books signed Mourlot lower right. Dimensions of the painting 65x54 cm Total dimensions, with frame, 74x63 cm. Maurice Mourlot, born January 20, 1906 in Paris where he died on March 15, 1983, is a French painter, lithographer, engraver and draftsman. His brother, Fernand Mourlot (1895-1988), is the leader of the Mourlot lithographic printing company. Maurice is the youngest of nine children. His father, Jules Mourlot, printer-lithographer, noticed very early the drawing talent of his youngest son and postpones several of his drawings on the lithographic stone. Although admitted to Estienne school in Paris, the boy goes to Upper Turgot primary school, closer to the family home (1920-1923). In 1922, he began working at the family printing house, 18 rue de Chabrol in Paris, directed by Fernand, the older brother, after the disappearance of their father in 1920. They also work their brothers and sisters: Georges, Berthe, Jeanne and Andrée. Between 1928 and 1958, Maurice produced many exhibition posters for national museums: the Louvre Museum, the Carnavalet and Marmottan museums, the National Library, and many provincial museums - illustrated by Pierre Bonnard's Breakfast, Le Fife of Édouard Manet, The Scrubber Jean Simeon Chardin. By copying the works of the great painters with oil and then taking them back to the stone, he acquired a perfect mastery of pictorial and lithographic techniques. In 1934, his first exhibition took place at the gallery Le Balcon in Paris. Member of the Salon des Indépendants from 1936 to 1946 (except during the war years), he received, in 1937, the price of painting of the city of Paris, which consists of a year-long stay in North Africa from where he brings back a hundred works (oils, watercolors, drawings). On September 3, 1939, he was mobilized in the camouflage engineering company with other painters and sculptors - Maurice Brianchon, Marcel Damboise, etc. - and comedian Jean-Louis Barrault. He makes many sketchbooks. His best friend, the painter Richard Maguet (1896-1940) who had encouraged him to practice oil painting, died under the bombing of the bridge of Sully-sur-Loire. Maurice Mourlot will be demobilized at Miramont-de-Quercy and resumes his work as a lithographer. In 1941, on the advice of a friend, the painter-engraver Pierre-Eugène Clairin (1897-1980), he acquires the former town hall-school of Saint-Loup-de-Naud near Provins (Seine-et-Marne ) and settles there with Marcelline, his companion. From 1947 to 1959, he spent brief periods in Morocco, the Netherlands, Algeria, England and Switzerland. In 1960, he was named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. Maurice Mourlot, a draftsman-lithographer, is the artistic eye of the Imprimerie Mourlot and helps many painters postpone their works to stone. In 1953, with his friend, Charles Sorlier - who will become Marc Chagall's appointed lithographer - he created the great lithography of La Fée Électricité for Raoul Dufy. Beside his work in the service of painters and writers, Maurice Mourlot began, in the 1930s, a personal work of great diversity. He will not stop painting until three days before his death. We owe him oil paintings: landscapes and farm lessons, still lifes, bouquets, market scenes, nudes, self-portraits, domestic animals, birds, animals from the Jardin des Plantes, as well as drawings and lithographs in black and white. white and in color, woodcuts. The lithographs and woodcuts of Maurice Mourlot were made with a very small print run: five, eight, twenty-five copies maximum. He signed his first paintings "Jean-Maurice Mourlot", then simply "Mourlot". He lived away from public life, not concerned with success and recognition. Until 1971, he worked at the publisher Pierre Bordas where he directed, among other things, the layout and iconography of French textbooks Lagarde and Michard. On the death of his companion, he moved in 1968 in the small artist studio rue de la Tombe-Issoire in Paris, where he died in 1983. He rests in Paris at the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise.