Born in Bordeaux to a family of artists and architects, Guillaume Alaux was a pastellist who was recognised for his portraits, genre scenes, still-life paintings and seascapes. Though he studied in Paris at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts under prominent artists such as Léon Bonnat, Fernand Humbert and Henri Gervex, Alaux retained ties with Bordeaux’s late 19th-century art scene, working alongside the ‘painters of Bordelais elegance’, which included Jules Aviat, Paul Quinsac and Paul Antin. 

In Paris, Alaux often exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français and was a member of the jury of the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts. His studio in the French capital welcomed many an important figure of La Belle Époque, considered to be Paris’ Golden Age.

While he often worked with pastels, Alaux was also adept in oils – one of his paintings depicting life by the sea won the bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. 

Apart from France, Guillaume Alaux also exhibited his works in Rome, Brussels and the United States. 

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.

Born in London, Clausen trained at the National Art Training School (now the Royal Academy of Art) in South Kensington before going abroad for further studies at Art Antwerp Academy, and Académie Julian in Paris. Initially influenced by Dutch painting, he later embraced French naturalism and Impressionism, taking inspiration from the works of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Monet and Degas.

In the 1880s and early 1890s, Clausen frequently worked in pastel, often on rough brown paper, exhibiting several pieces in this medium. Between 1888 and 1890, he showcased pastel works at the Grosvenor Gallery and was a founding member of the New English Art Club, where he exhibited from 1890 to 1893. By 1891, he was showing at the Royal Academy, though his first solo exhibition only came in 1902. He was elected a Royal Academician a few years later in 1908.

Clausen was praised for his pastel technique more than his other artistic endeavours. One reviewer from his 1902 Goupil Gallery exhibition remarked, ‘the stroke of the pastel chalk seems to be the most direct and satisfactory means of expression for Mr. Clausen. In his oil paintings he often appears to hanker after it, hatching his paint without the same result in freshness…Here the notes are clear struck and decisive. He renders more than once a beautiful effect that is almost his own property.’

In 1926, Clausen was among eight British artists commissioned for a large mural in St. Stephen’s Hall at House of Commons and was knighted upon its unveiling the following year. Today, his pastel studies are held in the collections of the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Like many prominent French artists, Helleu studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he came under the mentorship of academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Yet, his true inspirations were his peers – impressionist Claude Monet and lifelong friend John Singer Sargent – whose influences can be seen in Helleu’s luminous, expressive style. (A 2025 retrospective of Sargent’s works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art included one by Helleu, highlighting their close connection.)

Though his rise was gradual, Helleu’s talent soon captivated Parisian high society, with his friendship with literary icon Marcel Proust and his marriage to Alice Guérin helping further the artist’s career. Helleu’s portraits of his wife, with their sweeping lines and refined detail, captured the imagination of aristocratic women like Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe. The duchess, a notable patron of the arts, played a vital role in promoting Helleu and was herself the subject of one of his large-scale portraits (now part of EKCART ASIA’s pastels collection). More famously, she inspired the character of Duchesse de Guermantes, a central figure in Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. De Caraman-Chimay was also a supporter of science, often financing Marie Curie’s groundbreaking research.

Helleu’s talent earned him the Légion d’honneur in 1904 and prestigious commissions, including the painting of the Grand Central Terminal ceiling in New York. His works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.

The second son of landscape painter John Linnell, James Thomas Linnell trained at the Royal Academy Schools alongside his brothers John and William.

Like his father, James excelled at landscape painting, though his palette was notably brighter. He began with religious subjects but, by the mid-1850s, was exhibiting mostly pastoral scenes of peasants, farm laborers and children.

Many of Linnell’s landscapes were painted in and around the Redstone estate at Redhill, which his father had acquired in 1851 and where the entire family lived. In 1872, a critic observed: ‘It is so rare an occurrence to find a picture by any one of the Linnell family bearing the distinctive title of the place represented, that one would naturally be led to suppose the compositions are merely imaginary; but this, as a rule, is far from the case. Surrey, and the wealds of Sussex, supply the artists with the groundwork of most of their beautiful compositions, and the localities may generally be recognised by those who are well acquainted with them.’

Linnell exhibited at the Royal Academy almost annually from 1850 to 1888. His works are held in the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, The Whitworth in Manchester, regional museums across the UK, the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey and the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut.

Belgian painter Maurice Lucien Henri Joseph Marie Pirenne, the son of a textile producer, was born in the once-industrial town of Verviers. Self-taught and fiercely anti-academic, the artist was highly influenced by Vermeer and Chardin, who ‘sought only to make a perfect work’. He effusively rejected the virtuosity and highly evocative nature of Expressionism and once said, ‘Take your personality and lock it in a safe.’

While Pirenne honed his skills and technique in the bigger cities of Brussels, Ghent and even Paris, he always found solace in the familiar sights of Verviers and returned in 1900, never finding another reason to leave. He became curator of the Verviers municipal museum in 1910, a position that he kept for nearly four decades and which allowed him to help preserve the town’s local heritage while continuing to pursue his passion. 

At the beginning of his career, Pirenne painted large oil canvases of his hometown before moving on to smaller formats, mainly in pastel, of urban landscapes and, when his only son was born, scenes of intimate family life. For more than 25 years, Pirenne painted some 600 small, atmospherically luminous pastels that depicted life in Verviers. He also painted his garden and its flowers, then the surroundings of his house. Often, his works were ‘sober, simple, melancholic and poetic’. As he grew older, Pirenne turned to portraits of his living spaces, as seen in ‘Interieur’, which is owned by EKCART ASIA. 

Eventually, Pirenne concentrated on subjects in his home and studio, and created still lives of everyday objects, friends and family, and all that he can see from his window. From his balcony overlooking the city, he painted the sky that ‘one sees everywhere’.

Pirenne enjoyed a firm friendship with André Blavier, the librarian of the Verviers library and author of texts on René Magritte. Blavier would later on provide the text for books on Pirenne’s paintings, drawings and particular brand of Modernism, making the artist known to a wider audience. He also organised multiple exhibitions of Pirenne’s works and often quoted the latter’s self-summation: ‘I am neither of the avant-garde, nor of the rearguard. I am not of the herd.’

Though he became almost blind, Pirenne painted (sometimes with his finger) until the end of his life in 1968 at the age of 96. Blavier, along with artist and former student Louis Klinkenberg, acted as his executors.