Georges Philibert Charles Marioniez Art for Sale and Sold Prices

b. 1865 - d. 1933

Georges Philibert Charles Marioniez (French, 1865-1933). Throughout his career, Marioniez painted genre scenes of peasants, landscapes, scenes inspired by fishermen' lives, as well as port scenes of Brittany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Many of Marioniez' paintings are housed in museums in the North of France, particularly in Douai and Cambrai. The son of an industrialist who owned a sugar refinery in Montigny-en-Ostrevent, France, Georges Philibert Marioniez was expected to pursue a serious profession rather than fine art - despite his artistic talent. Thus, he studied law and served as a magistrate in Boulogne-sur-Mer (1891), Avesnes-sur-Helpe (1894), and Cambrai (1897). However, while attending law school, Marioniez took art classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Douai and studied under Pierre Billet in Cantin. It was there that he met the artist Adrien Demont, who was the son-in law of the famous painter Jules Breton. Encouraged by Breton, he began exhibiting peasant genre and landscape scenes in Douai and Paris at the age of 22. Marioniez also began vacationing in Wissant, where he stayed with his Adrien Demont and his wife, Virginie Demont-Breton. There he devoted himself to painting coastal scenery and became associated with the "Ecole de Wissant", founded by Henri and Marie Duhem. In 1889, Marioniez became a member of the Societe des Artistes Francais. Marioniez' paintings of nature and the land, reflected his appreciation of the beauty of light, oftentimes capturing twilight in his paintings of the sea and ports which are always backlit like this example.

Marionez was also interested in photography and actually invented one of the first hand-held cameras, named the "Sphynx" which he had patented in 1891. The camera used a type of film that was invented by industrialist Victor Planchon (1863-1935), who was his relative. Using his camera to take more than 1,600 images (these are currently in the collection of the museum in Cambrai), Marioniez travelled throughout the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North Africa. Years later he also invented and patented a method of quelling the vibrations and jerky motions produced by the Lumiere Brothers' cinematographs. This device was unveiled in 1899 at the Societe Photographique in Cambrai. By 1905, Marioniez' success as an artist in combination with anti-clerical attitudes of the Combes administration led him to resign from the judiciary, and dedicate himself wholeheartedly to the pursuit of his art.