Max Moreau (XX) - Denise

Portrait of Denise
Format: 38 x 46 cm.
Oil on canvas, without a frame. Signed, Max Moreau 1926.

Portrait “Girl with a Red Bow” (on the back of the canvas reads “Denise van de Boogaerde, née 22.3.22”). The remarkable thing about this little painting is not the portrait itself, but the fact that it was painted by Max Moreau. Moreau was a Belgian painter. He was born on 2 September 1902 in Soignies, Belgium, and learned to paint from his father. In 1920 the artist moved with his family to Paris, where he copied paintings by Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez in the Louvre. He quickly built a successful international career as a society portraitist, but is best known for his loosely brushed, realistic portraits of Arab men and women in traditional attire, as well as his street scenes of Paris, Granada and North Africa. Moreau and his family lived in both Tunisia and Morocco before settling in Granada. After the painter’s death on 7 September 1992 in Granada, Spain, the Moorish-style house in which he lived and worked was converted into Carmen Museo Max Moreau, a museum dedicated to his life and art.