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Lot Essay
It is evident that towards the later years of Le Mayeur's Balinese Balinese period (post Japanese Occupation), the artist's surroundings have become a constant and gradually the only source of his inspirations. It was his immediate surroundings which the artist depicted constantly and portraying his only model, Ni Pollok. Many visitors have visited the house in Sanur, which was the artist's residence, studio as well as guest-house. The house has left such a deep impression on the novelist Nevil Shute that he wrote an extensive description of it in his novel, Round the bend.
"We went once or twice to a place on the other side of the strip called Sanoer, where a Belgian artist was married to a very fine Balinese woman. I think that was the most beautiful house I have ever been in, the walls covered with paintings of the Balinese and their way of life, and full of Balinese young men and women so that it was difficult to say from memory which of the scenes remembered from that house were real ones and which were painted." (Drs. Jop Ubbens and Cathinka Huizing, Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès: Painter-Traveller, Wijk en Aalburg, 1995, p. 169.)
Amongst the possible compositions, which the artist could assemble from the surroundings of his house by the beach of Sanur, one of his favourite depictions was the well groomed lotus pond. He has repeated the composition of several ladies by the lotus pond numerous times and although some critics have commented that the artist's thematic range in his late years had become rather inflexible, it is precisely the ability to re-create the sense of spontaneity of an every-day scene that remains striking.
The primary concern of the artist was to depict sunlight, colour and beauty, as in the words of a critic "Some might consider such an approach naive and uncommitted, but in fact, it is probably the purest and least mannered of all possible methods of working." (Ibid, p. 189)
"We went once or twice to a place on the other side of the strip called Sanoer, where a Belgian artist was married to a very fine Balinese woman. I think that was the most beautiful house I have ever been in, the walls covered with paintings of the Balinese and their way of life, and full of Balinese young men and women so that it was difficult to say from memory which of the scenes remembered from that house were real ones and which were painted." (Drs. Jop Ubbens and Cathinka Huizing, Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès: Painter-Traveller, Wijk en Aalburg, 1995, p. 169.)
Amongst the possible compositions, which the artist could assemble from the surroundings of his house by the beach of Sanur, one of his favourite depictions was the well groomed lotus pond. He has repeated the composition of several ladies by the lotus pond numerous times and although some critics have commented that the artist's thematic range in his late years had become rather inflexible, it is precisely the ability to re-create the sense of spontaneity of an every-day scene that remains striking.
The primary concern of the artist was to depict sunlight, colour and beauty, as in the words of a critic "Some might consider such an approach naive and uncommitted, but in fact, it is probably the purest and least mannered of all possible methods of working." (Ibid, p. 189)