Background
Jean Theodore Dupas was born in Bordeaux on February 2, 1882. He was the son of a merchant marine captain and began his adult life as a merchant seaman.
cartoonist decorator painter poster artist
Jean Theodore Dupas was born in Bordeaux on February 2, 1882. He was the son of a merchant marine captain and began his adult life as a merchant seaman.
He enrolled in art school, first in his native Bordeaux and later in Paris. He won the Prix de Rome in the category of painting in 1910 and studied at the Académie de France in Rome, from where he sent several paintings to the Paris Salons, although his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war.
Dupas’s work came to public prominence on the occasion of the seminal Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1925. He was chosen by the furniture designer Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann to provide paintings for the latter’s Maison d’un collectionneur, alongside furniture by Ruhlmann and objects by many of the leading Art Deco craftsmen of the day, while other paintings by Dupas were also displayed to great effect elsewhere in the Exposition.
In the late 1920’s and 1930’s Dupas won a number of important and prestigious commissions. In 1926 he worked alongside Ruhlmann and the sculptor Alfred Jeanniot on the decoration of the tearoom of the ocean liner Ile-de-France; the first of the grand transatlantic ships to be built in France after the First World War. By this time Dupas had firmly established his reputation. Writing in 1927, his fellow artist George Barbier could already note that ‘Few artists have at such an early age attained such a degree of success, or gathered around them such swarms of imitators and disciples.’
Dupas reached the height of his fame in the mid 1930’s, and in 1934 he received his most important commission to date; a series of large glass murals for the Grand Salon of the new French ocean liner, the Normandie. He was also commissioned to provide murals to decorate the Salon de l’Argenterie in the Royal Palace in Bucharest, but the work was only partly completed, and the outbreak of World War II meant that it was never installed.
In 1940 Dupas was named curator of the Musée Marmottan in Paris, and the following year was admitted to the Académie des Beaux-Arts and appointed a professor of painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He ended his career as the Director of the Musée Marmottan.
He died in 1964.
Bal des Étudiants Poster
The Riding Crop
Allegorie du Tissu
Where Is This Bower Beside the Silver Thames?
Le tricorne
Woman with Stole
A Pair of Wall Panels
La Procession
Study for La Gloire de Bordeaux
Portrait of a Woman with Hat
Thence to Hyde Park, Where Much Good Company, and Many Fine Ladies
Study for the Chariot of Poseidon Mural
Femme à la coiffe
La Femme à L'Ara
Pomone (Mlle Marguerite Grain)
Woman Seated in Front of Portrait
Woman with Flowered Hat
Jeunes fille aux fleurs
Poster for XVme Salon des artistes decorateurs
Panneau Decoratif
Arnold Constable
Regatta-Time's Pleasant, Richmond
Bordeaux
L'Abondance
He became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1941.