Georges Sauvage
French, 1845-1918
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Albert Auguste Georges Sauvage was a French painter, illustrator, and engraver.
Georges Sauvage was born on March 13, 1845, in Caen (Calvados), the son of Léon Pierre Sauvage, a house painter, and Marie Madeleine Françoise Pelfresne. One of his godfathers was Auguste Pommereuil, a craftsman who engraved gold and made barometers.
A student at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he made his debut under the name Georges-Sauvage at the 1874 Salon with an oil on canvas entitled L'Hétaïre; he is mentioned as a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme and his address in Caen is 15, rue Saint-Romain. He subsequently exhibited regularly at the Salon, then at the Salon des Artistes Français, of which he became a member. He received several awards: for his Saint Jérôme au désert (1879, oil on canvas, third-class medal), as well as for his lithographs and etchings. One of his friends was Edmond Yon, whom he painted. He is also mentioned as having taken classes with the painter Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ. His last participation in the Salon seems to date from 1905; his Paris address during this period is listed as 135 bis, rue de Rome. In the meantime, he was present at the International Exhibition in Bordeaux (1895).
Settling in Rue de Vaugirard, Impasse Ronsin, Georges Sauvage began producing portraits for notable figures, engravings, and original drawings in 1880, notably for the publishers Victor Palmé and Paul Ollendorff. He became treasurer of the Rennes literary society La Pomme.
In 1883, he became a member of the Caen Fine Arts Society. The following year, he began producing compositions for theater sets, an activity he would continue for several decades. He also illustrated musical scores.
Towards the end of the 1890s, he submitted drawings from the theater to the magazine Le Monde artiste.
He had a daughter, Yvonne, who was a pianist and appeared around 1900 as the leader of a quartet.
He lived at 80 Rue des Martyrs in Paris at the end of his life and died on May 22, 1918, at the Lariboisière Hospital in the 10th arrondissement. He is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery (14th division).