The sculptor, painter, and printmaker Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer in 1861 and passed away there in 1944.
He began as a painter within the Nabis circle, but around the age of 40, he turned to sculpture and emerged as one of its most significant representatives in the 20th century.His work The Mediterranean caused a sensation at the 1905 Paris Salon and marked the beginning of a path that would confirm his almost exclusive preference for depicting the female nude. His typical female figure features a robust, curvaceous body, smooth surfaces, and a somewhat expressionless face—strictly structured based on the principles of Classicism, yet far removed from academicism. A trip to Greece in 1908, and particularly to the Greek countryside, reinforced this stylistic ‘credo.’ This journey also influenced other categories of his work, such as the woodcuts and lithographs for the illustration of Virgil’s Eclogues (1926) and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (1935), where his hymn to the fullness of the female body continues.