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Roy de Maistre
Annunciation
ca. 1934
oil on panel
private collection |
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Roy de Maistre
Christ Falls for the First Time
ca. 1948-49
oil on canvas
private collection |
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Roy de Maistre
Figure Composition
1937
oil on canvas
Leeds Art Gallery, Yorkshire |
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Roy de Maistre
Interior (Sam Courtauld's Villa, France)
1948
oil on canvas
private collection |
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Roy de Maistre
Interior with Lamp
1953
oil on panel
Tate Gallery |
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Roy de Maistre
Portrait of Camilla, Lady Keogh
ca. 1940-50
oil on board
Leeds Art Gallery, Yorkshire |
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Roy de Maistre
Interior
1930
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery |
"De Maistre liked spending time with Francis [Bacon]. At a certain paint he asked if he might possibly paint a picture of Bacon's showroom at 17 Queensberry Mews and if, perhaps, Bacon himself would sit for a portrait. That summer or autumn [of 1930, when Bacon himself was just 21 and keen to pursue a career as a furniture and interior designer rather than a fine artist] de Maistre painted two pictures of the showroom. . . . The light in his paintings was subdued and melancholy, with nothing of the cheeky white élan suggested by
The Studio photographer or noted by reviewers. In one picture [directly above] de Maistre emphasized the bars in the small windows at the far corner of the studio."
– Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, from
Francis Bacon: Revelations (New York: Knopf, 2020)
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Roy de Maistre
Still Life: Fruit
1954
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery |
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Roy de Maistre
Still Life with Marrow
ca. 1934
gouache on card
private collection |
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Roy de Maistre
Still Life with Melon and Bell
ca. 1950-60
oil on canvas
private collection |
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Roy de Maistre
Studio - 13 Eccleston Street
after 1937
oil on board
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
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Roy de Maistre
Studio Interior
ca. 1946
oil on card
private collection |
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Roy de Maistre
The Beach
1924
oil on panel
private collection |
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Roy de Maistre
The Footballers
ca. 1950
oil on canvas
private collection |
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Roy de Maistre
Vegetable Still Life
1956
oil on board
Tate Gallery |
"LeRoy Leveson Joseph (Roy) de Maistre (1894-1968), painter, was born LeRoi Levistan de Mestre on 27 March 1894 at Maryvale, Bowral, New South Wales, son of Etienne Livingstone de Mestre, gentleman, and his wife Clara Eliza, née Rowe, and grandson of Prosper de Mestre. From 1898 the family lived at Mount Valdemar, Sutton Forest, where he was educated by tutors and governesses. In 1913 Roi went to Sydney to study the violin and viola at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music, and painting at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, under Norman Carter and Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo, who encouraged an interest in Post-Impressionism. . . . In 1916, as Roi Livingstone de Mestre, he tried to enlist in the Australian Imperial Forces; he was accepted for home service, as his chest measurement was not up to standard. Discharged in 1917 with general debility, he became interested in the treatment of shell-shock patients by putting them in rooms painted in soothing colour combinations. . . . In March 1930 he left Australia permanently. Henceforth he called himself Roy de Maistre, believing the modern spelling suited a modern painter. By the 1950s he had added the name Laurent, mistakenly believing in his own royal blood via Madame de St. Laurent, mistress of Edward, Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father; eventually he also added the name Joseph, in acknowledgment of a connexion with the philosopher, Joseph de Maistre, and changed the spelling of Levistan to Leveson. . . . De Maistre's paintings from the 1930s onwards are generally Cubist in style. Academic society portraits occur at all times. Occasionally biomorphic, Surrealist forms occur in 1930s paintings, and ambiguous content; so do variations on other masters, Mantegna, Piero, Courbet, or on newspaper photographs of royalty. Religious subjects begin later with his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Systematic variations on his own compositions became numerous. His webs of angled Cubist interlace and pattern are perfect forms for his obsessive ideas about the web of ancestry, family, friendship."
– Daniel Thomas, from the Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne University Publishing, 1981)
"The novelist Patrick White, who knew de Maistre well in the 1930s, acknowledged him as an "intellectual and esthetic mentor," which was high praise from a graduate of Cambridge who would go on to win the Nobel Prize. John Rothenstein, the director of the Tate Gallery from 1938 to 1964, described de Maistre as "a small upright figure, a miniature Roman emperor, dignified, discreetly dandified, courteous in an old-fashioned style, unyielding on his principles, exacting in his standards of behavior, to his friends boundlessly benevolent." His affectations were easily mocked, but the world de Maistre fashioned for himself was not pathetic. To enter his studio at 13 Ecclestone Street, reported White, was to embark "on a voyage of discovery. The narrow, white boarding of the studio walls together with white curtains did in fact suggest an actual ship. Through the great windows along one side, a sooty, fog-bound yard became in my eyes a mystic garden." To Rothenstein, the "theatre of Roy's actions was his home, his studio, the place where he preferred to see his friends, and which he was forever embellishing."
– Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, from Francis Bacon: Revelations (New York: Knopf, 2020)
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