Provenance: Private Collection, France

ABOUT THE WORK

Having studied in Europe, and later finding his home in France, Vitalis’ art is inevitably predisposed by European masters. He took up his formal artistic training at the Academie de Montmartre where he worked and mingled with various notable artists such as Pablo Picasso and André Bréchet. Influenced by Jacques Villon, early in his career, Macario Vitalis adopted a style inspired by cubism before returning to a style inspired by impressionism then by the pointillism. In the 1950’s he was living in Brittany where he created a series of Breton seascapes that featured Post-Impressionist color schemes In 1975, he was declared “the only honorary citizen” of Ple’stin-les-Gre’ves, Brittany where he had originally settled. In this piece, the artist’s concern is not of the genre, as such, but in executing the visual potential of a subject into a highly textured orchestration of colors and tones in a painting. It goes beyond genre to create a total sensuous situation of color and texture, resulting in a synthesis of the senses. His rendering of traditional common-folk images invokes a sense of nostalgia and the warm feeling of coming home.