Albert Simon Bussy studied under Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where among his fellow students he met and befriended Henri Matisse. Bussy’s pastels were widely admired by his contemporaries and were avidly collected. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote of the artist that, ‘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.”
He mounted his first exhibitions of pastels at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1897 and 1899.
Around 1901 Bussy visited London, where he was introduced into local artistic circles by his friend, the artist William Rothenstein. (He later wrote a letter to Bussy in which he praised the exhibition of his work held at Leighton House; ‘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, 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.
From early in his career, Bussy produced splendid pastel landscapes – of views in Switzerland, Venice, Tunisia, Egypt and the Midi – and portraits of friends and family. After 1912, he began to focus on pastel drawings of birds and animals, many of which he studied at the London and Vincennes Zoos.
Most of Bussy’s pastel drawings of fish seem to have been made at the zoo at Vincennes, since he was unable to find adequate lighting at the London Zoo in order to make studies of fish there. As the French writer André Gide noted of the artist, ‘what now attracts him more and more rather than the likenesses of human beings are the likenesses of birds, fishes, insects. He spends most of his time at the London Zoo or in the Vincennes park or aquarium; then he shuts himself up with his collection of studies and by a kind of patient and lover-like distillation evolves 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 forty paintings and sixty-two pastels of animals and birds, held 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 lavishly produced book entitled Bestiaire, with text by Francis de Miomandre, published in Paris in 1927. 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 in Oxford, the Musée nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Musée départemental de l’Oise in Beauvais.
