[The following excerpt is taken from the fourth chapter of D H Laven’s much anticipated work-in-progress ‘The Story of Forgotten Art’. As Laven writes in his introduction: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this extract, he looks at the case of Eugene Matendré, a man once described as ‘if not the best, then at least the best-looking artist in France']
In June 1926, in the small village of Essanay outside the town of Montargis near the city of Paris, the body of a naked old man was dragged from a river. At the age of ninety four, Eugene Matendré had decided to drown himself. It wasn’t an easy decision, as his suicide note (well presented, with a firm sense of design) attests: Read the rest of this entry »
