Jean Veber (1864-1928), The Man With The Dolls, Circa 1895, Brown Ink Wash, Signed

Jean Veber (1864-1928), joined the School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1883. There he followed the very traditional and academic teaching of Jules Delaunay and Alexandre Cabanel but the artist quickly developed a very personal art and a trait singular which belong only to him.
“Taken together, the work of Jean Veber appears wonderfully diverse and varied. »Anatole France tells us in 1897.
His universe is easily dreamlike, sometimes disturbing and cruel, social subjects are not rare in this very diverse work. In a more traditional style, he is also the author of a large number of portraits, especially from 1898.
Jean Veber showed himself to be both a faithful and critical witness of his time, notably in his press cartoons in the style acute and in his caricatures; he was also a poster artist, illustrator and lithographer.
A prolific designer, all his painted works were preceded by preparatory drawings.
During his lifetime, he had two personal exhibitions in Paris, at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1897 and at the Galerie Allard in 1911. A retrospective of his work was dedicated to him after his death at the Petit Palais in 1930.
His work, dispersed after his dead, remains rare and sought after.
In Paris, the Carnavalet museum, the Petit Palais, the Louvre museum have works by him as well as the Nantes Arts Museum, the Lille Palais des Beaux-Arts, the Jean Jaurès de Castres museum, in the United States, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco.

The Man with the Dolls, a delicate brown ink wash, is a preparatory drawing for the large painting that recently reappeared on sale at Sotheby's in Paris on June 26, 2019.
When it was created, this painting was very noticed at the 1896 Salon, both by criticism only by the public.
This fascinating work inspired a novel published in 1899 by Louis Janot and Louis Lacroix under the pseudonym of Jean-Louis Renaud then, a pantomime by the composer Henri Berény staged in 1903 at the Théâtre des Capucines and finally, a film by an unknown director, released in 1909.