Albert Simon Bussy studied under Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where Henri Matisse was among his friends. He mastered the use of pastels early on in his career and would exhibit his work at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1897 and 1899. Bussy’s pastels were widely admired by his contemporaries and avidly collected. Of the artist’s creations, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, ‘The pastels of Simon Bussy are delicate images as precious as Persian miniatures. Precision and vitality are the characteristics of Simon Bussy’s talent, and his use of colour often reaches the heights of Matisse.’
Around 1901, Bussy visited London, where he was introduced into local artistic circles by the artist William Rothenstein, who later praised the former’s exhibition at Leighton House in a letter: ‘It was a real delight to see your work again, and I got more pleasure and emotion from your beautiful pastels than I have had from any pictures of late.’
In 1903, Bussy married Dorothy Strachey and moved to a house near Monaco, where they lived for the next three decades. The house, called Le Souco, became a meeting place for English and French artists, and writers and intellectuals visiting the area, including Dorothy’s brother Lytton Strachey and her cousin Duncan Grant, as well as Matisse, Rudyard Kipling, André Gide, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Bernard Berenson, who came to own several of Bussy’s pastels, as did Jean Schlumberger.
Early in his career, Bussy produced portraits of friends and family, as well as splendid pastel depictions of landscapes in Switzerland, Venice, Tunisia, Egypt and the Meditterranean. By the time he reached his 40s, he had turned to drawing likenesses of birds and animals. Often, his subjects were creatures at the London and Vincennes zoos. He preferred drawing the fish at Vincennes, reasoning that the aquariums at the London Zoo had inadequate lighting. As the French writer André Gide noted, Bussy, after spending time at the zoo, would ‘shut himself up with his collection of studies and, by a kind of patient and lover-like distillation, evolve from them his paintings.’
Throughout his career, his pastels and paintings were exhibited at galleries in London and Paris. Among the most significant of these was an exhibition of 40 paintings and 62 pastels of animals and birds at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1925. Some of these pastel studies were later used for larger works in oil on canvas, several of which were illustrated in a stunning book entitled Bestiaire, published in Paris in 1927 with text by Francis de Miomandre. By the Second World War, Bussy’s reputation had fallen into a decline in France although he continued to exhibit at the Leicester Galleries in London. He died in London in 1954 at the age of 88 and the contents of his studio went into auction at Sotheby’s in 1960.
Paintings and pastels by Simon Bussy are today in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate in London, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, the Musée nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Musée départemental de l’Oise in Beauvais.
