DE ROSNAY Gaëtan
Louis Eugène Gaëtan Fromet DE ROSNAY, dit Gaëtan de Rosnay (May 17, 1912 – October 19, 1992) was a French-Mauric painter.
Gaëtan de Rosnay was born in Curepipe to the family of a sugar planter, Eugene de Rosnay and his wife, Simone Martin. His paternal family (Fromet de Rosnay) from Champagne and Yonne settled in Mauritius in the 19th century. Gaëtan de Rosnay spent his life between his native island of the Indian Ocean and France, where he arrived at the age of two in August 1914, when his father went to Paris to serve the French reserve forces. He studied high school in Paris at Franklin Jesuit College, then at Gerson School. Gaëtan de Rosnay returned to Mauritius in 1934 to work in the family plantation until 1939. He also worked drawing with the painter Max Boullé. At the instigation of the painter of the Marine Jean-Gabriel Daragnès, passing to Mauritius, who notes his talent, he entered the workshop of the affichist Paul Colin in Paris. He spent the entire occupation in France and, at the Liberation, was part of the core of the painters of the New School of Paris who gave life to a new form of figurative art, represented in particular by those who exhibited at the Salon de la Jeune Painting, founded by the painter Paul Rebeyrolle, and of which he was elected vice-president: Paul Aizpiri, Maurice Boitel, Yves Brayer, Bernard Buffet,Jean Commère, Michel de Gallard, Pierre-Henry, Daniel du Janerand, Jean Jansem, Robert Savary, Maurice Verdier, etc.
He returned from the 1950s to stay several months a year on his native island. His paintings are inspired by Mauritian landscapes with marines (Grand Bay, Sailings to Mauritius, etc.) Pieterboth, markets, lavender, hunting scenes, etc. He met Malcolm de Chazal at that time. From the late 1960s he also made winter stays in Grisons (Switzerland), where he eventually acquired a small shawl in Klosters. Here too, he paints landscapes of mountains in increasingly bright colors. A personal exhibition was dedicated to him at the French cultural centre in Mauritius in 1983. He spent two months a year in Mauritius in the 1980s. He made a final stay there in 1990. He died in his house in the Yonne where he lived in spring and autumn.
If, in the 1930s, his painting retains a character still very close to reality, revealing his qualities as a cartoonist (The Old Indian, 1934), he gradually evolves towards a stylized mode in which a geometric form predominates in which he inserts his characters or landscapes (La Couturière 1942)
His works of the 1950s were illustrated by the tendency to miserabilism in the wake of Francis Gruber and Bernard Buffet, with Françoise Adnet, Philippe Cara Costea, André Minaux, Paul Rebeyrolle, etc... then his palette became richer. His 1959 exhibition at Galerie Lorenceau marks a milestone on his return from a two-year trip to Mauritius. From the 1960s he tended to superimpose on a figurative drawing dominant forms of shade and light, very colorful:The Champs-Elysées, 1960, Les Musiciens, 1966, Palais du gouvernement, Mauritius, 1973.
From his wife Natacha, born Kolchin (1914-2005), Gaëtan de Rosnay had three children: Zina (wife of Boutizac), Joël de Rosnay and Arnaud de Rosnay (1946-1984).