Alexandre Séon 

Biography of Alexandre Séon  ( 1855-1917 )

The son of shopkeepers, although he claimed a peasant background, Alexandre Séon received a classical education and showed an early talent for drawing and painting. His region, with its mysterious sites and fantastic legends, influenced his unbridled imagination. Admitted to the Beaux-Arts in Lyon, Séon worked as an ornamental designer for the local industry. In 1877, he moved to Paris, where he entered Henri Lehmann's studio at the École des Beaux-Arts. There he met Georges Seurat, of whom he remained a close friend, as well as Alphonse Osbert, Aman-Jean and Ernest Laurent.

In 1880, the artist tired of academic studies and sought the advice of Puvis de Chavannes, whose favorite pupil he became, as well as a close collaborator in the implementation of the master's major decors (Pantheon, Lyon museum staircase, etc.). Séon exhibited at the Salon from 1879, then at the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1890 to 1896, and again at Artistes français from 1897. He had won the competition to decorate the marriage hall of the Courbevoie town hall, a critically acclaimed project that began in 1885 and was partly exhibited at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. Despite his ambitions as a decorator, the painter, with the exception of a few private commissions (chapel at Château de l'Orfrasière), had to be content with easel art from then on.

A close friend of Joséphin Péladan, whose portrait he painted, he was a loyal exhibitor at the Salons de la Rose+Croix from 1892 to 1897. For his idealistically inspired paintings and drawings of great perfection of form, Séon became one of the most esteemed figures among Symbolist theorists. Alphonse Germain wrote extensively about him. Anxious to “reconcile Idealism with the modern spirit”, as he wrote to the Minister of Fine Arts in 1892, Séon was also a humanist concerned with the times.

A Paris schoolteacher with a passion for transmitting beauty, he helped found the Universités Populaires, published low-cost lithographs for the less fortunate, and dreamed of changing the world through art. The poet Ernest Raynaud called him a “missionary of beauty”. A friend to poets and a remarkable illustrator, this singular, solitary and demanding artist was respected by all, even those who did not belong to the idealistic sphere. Subtly combining the heritage of Puvis de Chavannes and Seurat, Séon left an inspired body of work in which visionary quest, revisited antiquity and purity of form transpose the beauty of nature and the ideal of human perfection into a Baudelairian universe, beyond material realities and school quarrels.