Paul Jouve

Paul Jouve is very well-known primarily as an animal painter, then as an engraver and an illustrator of great importance.

He first started exhibiting paintings at the age of fifteen, later illustrating for Kipling’s The Jungle Book. He concentrated his art first on lions and other members of the cat family, but later widened his repertoire to eagles, elephants, snakes, and buffaloes. His casts are modeled in exactly the same vein as his paintings.

Paul Jouve prepared for his eleven-month journey in the Far East as an official artist for France, having won sponsorship from the Indo-Chinese governing body in 1921. He sailed from Marseille late in the summer of 1922. Heading for Port Saïd, he passed through the Suez Canal and, after several stops, reached Cochinchine, making his way first to Saigon, then up the Mekong river to Phnom Penh. Jouve reached Angkor in October, where he marveled at the huge temples rising up from the jungle.

He spent three months in Angkor, making this the longest single stop of his journey. He made paintings of the elephants that bathed in front of the temple of Bayon at Angkor Thom, which had been the subject of many sketches by Rodin when the two artists had visited the colonial exhibition in Marseille in 1906, in which he showed eight drawings and three sculptures. During his stay in Angkor, Jouve made countless notes and sketches that were to inform his later illustration of Le Pellerin d'Angkor by Pierre Lotti. This trip had a significant influence on his work through the years that followed.