Paul Maze
1887-1979
An Anglo-French painter in oils, pastel and watercolour, particularly of regattas and other sporting and ceremonial occasions, Maze was born in Le Havre in 1887. His father, having previously been a merchant in the Coffee and Rubber Trade, was a collector and friend of various artists, including Dufy and Braque both of whom were influential upon Maze during his childhood.
Maze worked for ten years in his father's firm importing India rubber and coffee to Liverpool and Hamburg. He then spent a year in Canada, followed by nine months as a sailor. Upon his return to Europe Maze began to devote himself entirely to painting.
He was educated in England and went to the front in World War I with the Royal Scots Greys where he met Winston Churchill in the trenches. They became lifelong friends and Maze encouraged Churchill to paint. Afterwards Maze wrote A Frenchman in Khaki (1934) based on these experiences.
After the war Maze was part of the Parisian art scene and his friends included Derain, Segonzac, Levy, Roussel and Vuillard. Maze married a British wife in 1921 and took British nationality. Henceforth he lived mainly in England, but continued to make frequent visits to France.
Maze’s first one-man exhibition was held at the Independent Gallery, London, in 1925. Winston Churchill remained a close friend of the artist and wrote in his foreword to the catalogue of Maze's first New York exhibition in 1939: "His great knowledge of painting and draughtsmanship have enabled him to perfect his remarkable gift. With the fewest of strokes he can create an impression at once true and beautiful. Here is no toiling seeker after preconceived effects, but a vivid and powerful interpreter to us of the forces and harmony of Nature."
At the time of Maze's exhibition in Paris during 1945, his friend Dunoyer de Segonzac wrote: "Paul Maze is above all an intuitive artist; he is the antithesis of the contemporary school of painting which wishes to ignore nature and to practise an art of the laboratory. Paul Maze's Norman origin, his childhood spent in the region of the estuary of the Seine, classifies him with the painters of Honfleur, Rouen and Havre. Jongkind, Boudin and Claude Monet are his visual ancestors; and, like them, with his 'gris colore' he is the poet of the sky and water.”
His work is held in the collections of many major galleries including The Tate Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum.