SOUVERBIE Jean

Jean SOUVERBIE (born 21 March 1891 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine) is a French theatre painter and decorator.

A figurative painter, Jean Souverbie painted compositions of nudes and still lifes of a very modern bill, based on the number of gold. Born to a bourgeois family whose father was a relatively fragile engineer of the Arts and Crafts, he was often ill, which made him lonely. As a result, he did not attend school and received instruction at home from his father and older sisters. Later, he was given a private teacher. Drawing constantly, he presents some facilities and arrangements for this art which he had discovered as a child, amazed by the strong waters of Rembrandt. By the age of ten, his father offered him a box of oil colours, a easel, a palette and canvases.

Attracted by the theatre sets where his parents took him once a year to the Châtelet, he made models, including machinery.

At the beginning of the 20th century, his parents moved and settled in Saint-Germain-en-Laye for the winter and the rest of the year on the French Riviera. At Versailles Castle and in his park, he discovers the harmony, proportions, aesthetics of the art of classicism. Maurice Denis noticed in 1908 the artist's self-portrait and had an interview with him. In 1911, the family moved to Paris, Amsterdam Street. He entered the Julian Academy in the studio of Jean-Paul Laurens. In 1913 he met Roger Chastel, who would become a friend for life. Because of its weak constitution, Jean Soubervie was reformed when World War I broke out.

In 1916 he joined the Ranson Academy where he met the nabis: Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton. Here he found his friend Jean-Eugène Bersier, painter and engraver, an art historian to whom he dedicated an oil on board around 1930, entitled Nature morte à la père et au Sucrier.

Here he finds something to satisfy his taste for the great theatrical compositions, his taste for the ancient. His father died in 1918 and was forced to work. He left the Ranson Academy and, a few months later, met a woman whom he married in 1920. She will become her favorite model, as well as the mother of their five children. One of them, Romain Souverbie (born 1929) will also become a painter. Jean Souverbie undergoes an operation which finally frees him from his disease and then begins unbridled activity. He then turned to cubism.

He lives in Saint-Germain in the former Duchess hotel in Longwy, where he organizes exhibitions. He is a great admirer among others of his friend Pablo Picasso to whom the bill of his nudes is similar. By the 1930s, he devoted himself mainly to monumental art and presented all his works at the Venice Biennale. He works as a decorator with Jacques Rouché, director of the Paris Opera.

In 1945, a monumental art workshop was created for him and he was the emeritus professor. Among his best-known students are Philippe de La Hogue-Rey, Philippe Lejeune, Jean Le Merdy, Yves de Saint-Front, Georges Visconti and Pierrette Bloch.