Jean Despujols
1886-1965

Jean Despujols was born in Salles, in the Bordeaux region of France. Despujols was a student in Bordeaux and then in Paris. In 1914 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome. He was a soldier on the front in World War One, where he did many sketches of his experiences.

Despujols exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries, Salon des Indépendants and Salon des Artistes Français. He won many prizes. He showed his paintings in Copenhagen, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Geneva.

In 1923 he became a professor at l’Académie Americaine des Beaux-Arts, at Fontainebleau. He continued to paint and exhibit for the next decade.

Despujols traveled to Indochina in 1937-38 on an official mission to document his experiences in art. He produced more than three hundred works that were exhibited at l’Orangerie des Tuileries, unfortunately this exhibition corresponded with the declaration of war in 1939. Eventually his paintings, journals, and musical compositions became the subject of a documentary film produced by the Meadows Museum of Art, in Louisiana, in 1984. In 2003, this same museum assembled an exhibition in of these works.

Despujols’ work may be categorized as neo-classical, in the tradition of Raphael, but with a decidedly modern flavor. Like his Bordeaux colleagues, Jean Dupas, Robert Poughéon, and Raphaël Delorme, he saw the world in terms of the utopian ideals that flourished between the wars. The optimism shown by these artists after experiencing “the war to end all wars” is astounding. Posing his models in idyllic scenes of beauty, and using his fine brush strokes and unusual colors he created a world of imagination. This “Bordeaux School” style was incorporated into the interiors created by the great designers of the Art Deco period.

Despujols died in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1965.