Clovis Trouille

Camille Clovis Trouille, was born on 24 October 1889, in La Fère, France. He worked as a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins, but is remembered as a Sunday painter who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts of Amiens from 1905 to 1910. He died on 24 September 1975 in Paris.<!-- Image with unknown copyright status removed: -->

Works

• His service in World War I gave him a lifelong hatred of the military, expressed in his first major painting Remembrance (1931). The painting depicts a pair of wraith-like soldiers clutching white rabbits, an airborne female contortionist throwing a handful of medals, and the whole scene being blessed by a cross-dressing cardinal.

This contempt for the Church as a corrupt institution provided Trouille with the inspiration for decades of pictorial blasphemies:

• Dialogue at the Carmel (1944) shows a skull wearing a crown of thorns being used as an ornament.
• The Mummy shows a mummified woman coming to life as a result of a shaft of light falling on a large bust of André Breton.
• The Magician (1944) has a self-portrait satisfying a group of swooning women with a wave of his magician's wand.
• My Tomb (1947) shows Trouille's tomb as a focal point of corruption and depravity in a graveyard.

• Trouille's other common subjects were sex, as shown in Lust (1959), a portrait of the Marquis de Sade sitting in the foreground of a landscape decorated with a tableau of various perversions, and a "madly egoistic bravado"......
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