El beso - Charles Maurin

Maurin organised Toulouse-Lautrec's first solo exhibition, in 1893. He was a friend and mentor to Felix Vallotton, a close associate of Ambroise Vollard, and a regular exhibitor at Josephin Peladan's Salon de la Rose+Croix. Despite these connections to the centre of Post-Impressionist and Symbolist Paris, he remains almost unknown today, overshadowed by the artists he championed.

He was born in Le Puy-en-Velay in 1856. The Prix Crozatier funded his move to Paris, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Jules Lefebvre and at the Academie Julian, where he later taught. He exhibited at the Salon from 1883 and participated in the Rose+Croix exhibitions between 1892 and 1897.

His dual mastery of painting and printmaking made him a bridging figure between Symbolism and the 1890s revival of colour printmaking. His colour etchings and wood engravings from this period are technically accomplished and compositionally inventive. His painted work, particularly his Symbolist studies of maternity, combines academic draughtsmanship with the decorative flatness of the Nabis. He was among a handful of artists who understood both the chemical processes of printmaking and the aesthetic possibilities of colour on paper, and his technical innovations influenced the next generation of French printmakers. He died in 1914, at fifty-eight, on the eve of the war that would scatter the world he had helped build.