Barki Gergely et al.: Czóbel. A French Hungarian painter - ArtMill publications 5. (Szentendre, 2014)
Mimi Kratochwill: Béla Czóbel's mature period, 1925-1976
232. BÉLA CZÓBEL: FRENCH LANDSCAPE (LANDSCAPE IN NORTHERN FRANCE WITH HAYSTACKS), 1930. PRIVATE COLLECTION Czóbel made numerous new, interesting acquaintances in the French capital. It was here that he met Monsieur Paul Paquereau (born in 1871), a former stage designer of the Théatre Frangaise later to become a college professor and an art dealer, who collected Czóbel’s works and organized exhibitions from them. Czóbel painted several pictures of the elderly man (in 1930,1935,1949), of which we know of three paintings and several graphics. By the 1970s all three of the paintings depicting Monsieur Paquereau were owned by foreigners, thus their dating ran into certain difficulties. The earliest portrait of the elderly gentleman, painted in 1930, shows him down to the waist with arts periodicals set on the table before him (Plate 235). His personality is rendered through his vigorous, marked facial features. In the other two depictions the elderly gentleman shown down to the waist in a seated position wears a baret and glasses (Plate 236), and is wrapped in a scarf (in one of these two pictures he holds a pipe in his hand). His former, strong features have mellowed but his sharp, intelligent gaze is unchanged. Here the artist rendered his model in a more colourful and detailed way, and did not emphasize his youthful seriousness with subdued colours like in his work of 1930. From their correspondence we have discovered that in addition to his studio on the Rue Barrault, Czóbel also maintained a small apartment in the Hotel Modern on the Avenue du Maine. During these years he truly felt at home in France. He was inundated with invitations to participate in group exhibitions and many individual exhibitions were also organized from his works. He did not cut his ties to Hungary either, as his pictures regularly featured in Budapest shows. 148 CZÓBEL, A FRENCH HUNGARIAN PAINTER
