Paul Maze 

As a child, Maze saw Pissarro working and used to sit and paint beside Dufy on the beach at his native Le Havre. He was educated in England and went to the front in World War I with the Royal Scots Greys where he met Winston Churchill in the trenches. They became lifelong friends and Maze encouraged him to paint. After the war he was part of the Parisian art scene and his friends included Derain, Segonzac, Levy, Roussel and, in particular, Vuillard who convinced him that he would make his mark on the art world by using pastels.

PAUL MAZE was born in Le Havre in 1887 of French parentage, his father having been a merchant in the Coffee and Rubber Trade. It was alongside the estuary of the Seine that he spent his childhood, and the sea ever since has held a great fascination for him. It has been a recurring theme in his work, to which he always turns a fresh eye. In early days he was fortunate to have known intimately DUFY, BRAQUE, FRIEZ at Le Havre, and eventually in Paris, VUILLARD, BONNARD, SEGONZAC, SIMON LEVY and DERAIN, who greatly helped in the development of his own talent. During World War I Maze's experience was unique, having first served in the French Army and later in the British. A Frenchman in Khaki, which he wrote after the war, gives an admirable account of that period. He served in the British Army again in the Second World War. In sketching Sorry - this work is soldiers in action he learned to recreate complex scenes with a few bold lines. Winston Churchill, a close friend of the artist's, wrote in his foreword to the catalogue of Maze's first New York exhibition in 1939: "His great knowledge of painting and draughtsmanship have enabled him to perfect his remarkable gift. With the fewest of strokes he can create an impression at once true and beautiful. Here is no toiling seeker after preconceived effects, but a vivid and powerful interpreter to us of the forces and harmony of Nature."

At the time of Maze's exhibition in Paris during 1945, his friend DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC wrote: "Paul Maze is above all an intuitive artist; he is the antithesis of the contemporary school of painting which wishes to ignore nature and to practise an art of the laboratory. Paul Maze's Norman origin, his childhood spent in the region of the estuary of the Seine, classifies him with the painters of Honfleur, Rouen, Havre. Jongkind, Boudin, Claude Monet are his visual ancestors; and, like them, with his 'gris colore' he is the poet of the sky and water.