Artists

Paul Charles Chocarne-Moreau

French, 1855-1931

Chocarne-Moreau, a native of Dijon, was to spend nearly all his life in Paris. A student at the Ecole des Beaux-arts under William Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury, he began exhibiting at the annual Paris Salon in 1882. The artist was awarded a medal at the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris, a Second Class medal at the Salon of 1900, and made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1906.

Frederick Dolman, in the Strand Magazine of 1903, gives an excellent analysis of the appeal of this painter: "The leading comedian in the art of the Salon is, I consider, M. Chocarne-Moreau, whose brush is responsible for most of the smiles with which the mass of visitors emerge from the portals of the Salon every spring time. His popularity with the Parisians is doubtless due, in part, to the fact that all his subjects are derived from the streets of Paris. Apart from a few portraits, nearly all M. Chocarne-Moreau's work has been concerned with comic little episodes such as the artist actually witnesses in the course of his peregrinations on and about the boulevards. He has the quickness of a newspaper draughtsman in seizing the crucial moment of the scene, combining with the talent of the brush in giving it an enduring interest and vitality."