Edward Cucuel

EDWARD CUCUEL

San Francisco 1875 – 1954 Pasadena

Highly esteemed in international art circles, Edward Cucuel was an illustrator, portraitist, genre and landscape painter.   His enormous popularity among both European and American audiences is explained in part by his own cosmopolitan life which afforded ready exposure to these markets.   Although he kept a residence in New York for many years, Cucuel spent most of his career living and working abroad in Paris, Munich, Zurich, Japan and elsewhere.

Cucuel was first drawn to Paris in 1893 to study under Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.   There he employed his talents as an illustrator and later an Artist-Correspondent for the Illustrated London News.   While forming his financial base, Cucuel continued to study and took advantage of the abounding Bohemian culture.   In addition to his exposure at the Ecole, the young artist took part in the teachings of Benjamin Constant and Jean Paul Laurens at the Academie Julian and Leo Putz in Munich.   Cucuel’s personal notes from this period in Europe formed the basis for Bohemian Paris of Today (1900), a book written by W. C. Morrow and illustrated by Cucuel.

It was not until 1904 that Cucuel began devoting the majority of his time to painting.   He was an instant success and even had a painting exhibited in Berlin that same year.   Within the next eight years, he exhibited works at the Salon National des Beaux-Arts and Salon d’Automne in Paris, the 1912 Spring Exhibition of the Munich Secession, as well as London’s Grosvenor Gallery and the Fine Arts Society.

Throughout this period, Cucuel kept himself abreast of the works of the early twentieth century’s artistic vanguard, including that of Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault and the German Expressionists.   In fact, Cucuel experienced an absorption of Post-Impressionist tendencies which strengthened his en plein air techniques.   In 1927, Cucuel’s European popularity and success were confirmed by the publication of Der Maler Edward Cucuel by Fritz von Ostini and later by E.V. Savory’s Colour Plates of Edward Cucuel.

Cucuel returned to New York in the later 1920s and remained there for over ten years.   There too he established a fine reputation for his abilities and was invited to exhibit at numerous institutions, including the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Art Institute of Chicago.   He also earned a silver medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.

The work of Edward Cucuel is represented at the Detroit Art Institute, Michigan, the Musée Nationale des Arts et Decoration (Louvre), Paris, Maison Braun et Cie, Paris, as well as Birkenhead Museum, Liverpool.