Notre Dame in the Snow

Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 72 x 53 cm (28.3 x 20.9 in)
Size: Signed bottom left: Levy-Dhurmer

Born in Algeria, Lucien Lévy returned as a boy with his family to France, where he in 1885 finished his schooling, with honours, at the École communale supérieure de Dessin et Sculpture in Paris. Having been accepted at the Paris Salon beginning in the year 1882, (well before he had finished schooling,) he continued to show there until 1889, when the young artist suddenly departed the capital for the Côte d’Azur, abandoning a still promising career in Paris. He was absent for 6 years. However, nearing his thirtieth birthday in 1895, Lévy travelled to Venice and Florence, where the work of da Vinci and the Renaissance Masters captivated him. The trip, a life-altering experience for Lucien, markedly re-focused him on his earlier artistic ambitions. He returned to Paris and his art.

In late 1895, sometime before October, Lévy-Dhurmer re-established himself in Paris. Painting full-time, he had taken his mother’s name of Dhurmer and settled in a studio down the road from Gustave Moreau’s in the ninth arrondissement. The Belgian poet George Rodenbach, through a mutual friend, shortly invited the young artist to lunch; he wished Lévy-Dhurmer to draw his portrait. (The portrait, made three years after the publication of Bruges-la-Morte, which made Rodenbach a symbolist literary icon, is today in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ) This friendship seems to have been the force behind Lévy-Dhurmer’s first solo exhibition early the next year at the Galerie George Petit.

The show of around 25 pastel and 5 paintings at the Petit Gallery, instantly established Lévy-Dhurmer’s reputation in Paris. One critic proclaimed him “a youth, a debutant and also a master,” asking rhetorically if the artist was “Symbolist, Mystic, or Romantic.” Another critic likened him to “da Vinci, Botticelli and Memling, the ancients, the moderns… “

In 1901 he traveled to Spain and thence to Holland and Brittany, where Gauguin had first idealized the Breton peasant in raw color, inspiring both Maurice Denis and Albert Besnard. Lévy-Dhurmer, however, preferred a more refined technique and his portrayal of Breton peasant life may be better compared to the works of Bastien-Lepage and Dagnan-Bouveret. His next journey, to Morocco, further broadened his horizons and a hint of Orientalist fantasy frequently reoccurs in much of his subsequent work. Traveling in North Africa and then Turkey he made greater use of pastels, easier to carry and use when traveling, and they remained a favored medium throughout his subsequent career. In the first decade of the century he produced much of his best work, notably Les Aveugles de Tanger, 1901 (Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne), and the Mère Bretonne (Musée de Brest).

Lévy-Dhurmer continued working as a celebrated portraitist, draughtsman, pastelist and painter of religious, genre, symbolist and landscape paintings until the second World War. Large scale gallery shows were organized to celebrate Lévy-Dhurmer’s career in 1927, and again in 1937. Upon the artist’s death in 1952, a retrospective exhibition was organized by the French Museums in Paris. More recently again, a further exhibition was organised by the Louvre at the Grand Palais in 1973, Autour de Lévy-Dhurmer, to celebrate the acquisition of a group of major pastels now hanging in the Musée d’Orsay.