Master Art

In his monograph on the artist, published in 1926, Arsène Alexandre aptly described Maxime Maufra as ‘a poet of the sea’. Working en plein-air and intent on depicting the stormy seas of the Breton coast, he often painted during the most violent weather, with his easel supported against the wind by the artist’s long-suffering wife. As Maufra once wrote of his approach to painting landscapes and marine subjects: ‘I work relentlessly, I try to express the strong sensations, the strange aspects of nature, the cosmic effects, in a gale, under moonlight, the tempests, shipwrecks, tormented landscapes, floods, waterfalls; in other words, everything which can be rendered not in a fleeting impression of an effect but on the contrary in condensing all that this effect carries in itself, this with a preoccupation of the picture and its subject.’