Rating and value of paintings by Maxime Maufra

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Rating and value of the artist Maxime Maufra  

Maxime Maufra was a French pstimpressionist painter who followed in the footsteps of the 19th-century marine painters. He is also an engraver and lithographer, and his works are appreciated on the auction market.

The price at which these are sold ranges from €40 to €11,900, a consequent delta but one that speaks volumes about the value that can be attributed to Maxime Maufra's works.

The oil on canvas Le vent, dating from 1899, sold for €160,000.

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

Artist's style and technique

Maxime Maufra creates landscapes and seascapes as his main themes, focusing on the Breton coast, ports, shores and natural elements in motion. He has a post-impressionist approach that draws naturally on the Impressionist heritage with the light and transience used in his compositions.

He varies moods and tackles both the quietude and the force of the elements, sometimes depicting agitated landscapes, conceiving nature not just as decorative but also as expressive.

His composition is structured yet free. Despite the visual spontaneity, there are clear lines of force (wide skies, bodies of water, shorelines), and marked choices of framing with winding paths and a plant foreground.

Oil on canvas is the majority in his work, this medium enabling him to work with matter and color in depth. His gestures are varied, with broad, generous strokes to render matter, but also more worked layers to capture atmospheric effects.

However, his oils on canvas are influenced by his etching and lithography studio : his etched corpus implies a link between drawing, plan and painting in his process.

His palette is often rich in blues, greens, ochres, mid-tones and contrasting touches. He captures the changing light of the coasts and transcribes it into the pictorial material.

Maufra works with both small study formats and canvases of more prestigious dimensions. The variety of formats contributes to the breadth of his body of work.

The life of Maxime Maufra   

Maxime Maufra (1861 - 1918) was a painter born in Nantes. He was the son of Émile Maufra, head of a metallurgy and mechanical engineering company in Nantes.

He received his secondary education at the Lycée de Nantes, and developed a passion for drawing and painting from the age of 18, under the tutelage of Charles Leduc, Alfred Leduc and Charles Le Roux.

From 1881 to 1884, he was sent by his family to Liverpool (England) to train in business. During this stay, he discovered English painting (Turner in particular) and gradually turned to plein-air painting.

In 1886, he participated for the first time in the Salon de Paris and the Salon de Nantes. Here, he exhibited his first post-impressionist paintings. In 1890, he decided to leave his commercial career behind and devote himself to painting, settling in Brittany, between Pont-Aven and Poldu. There, he rubbed shoulders with Paul Gauguin and Paul Sérusier, but also Gustave Loiseau and Émile Bernard.

In 1893, he moved to the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre, a place in full artistic effervescence. He continued to travel to Brittany, but also to Normandy, the South of France and Algeria (1913), to capture light and nature in the open air.

In 1916, he was appointed official painter to the Navy. He died in 1918 in Poncé-sur-le-Loir (Sarthe). He remains a major figure in French landscape and marine painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His works are held in several French and international museums.

He was part of the circle of artists associated with the Pont-Aven and Poldu schools, while remaining independent of their doctrines. In particular, he wrote " I prefer vivid coloring, but one can paint with black ".

He collaborated for a long time with the Durand-Ruel gallery, which contributed to his commercial recognition. His style vacillates between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, with a sensitivity for light, color, the movement of water and the sky.

" I prefer bright coloring, but you can paint with black "

Maxime Maufra

Market segmentation and artist rating

For the Maxime Maufra corpus, oils on canvas constitute the core market. Works on paper (drawings, watercolors) make up the middle segment, and prints and etchings the entry segment.

The buoyant periods and subjects are the years 1890 - 1905, with seascapes and Breton sides (Belle-Île, le Croisic, Étretat), harbor views and changing skies. Sales are mostly in France, but also in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Medium-format paintings are highly liquid. Large, well-situated formats or "belle époque " subjects command premiums. Smaller formats and studies sell at more contained prices.

Today, Maxime Maufra is ranked 2109th artist by annual auction sales. The valuation factors are on the one hand the artist's signature subjects, notably Breton seascapes, the period 1890 - 1905, his gallery provenance, medium to large format.

Late works as well as small formats, generic terrestrial subjects and average states of preservation are less emblematic.

Recognizing the artist's signature

Maxime Maufra signs at the bottom of his canvases with his name in all lower-case letters. In some works, he also inscribes the date.

How to find out the value of a work

If you happen to own a work by Maxime Maufra, request a free appraisal without further delay via our form on our website.

A member of our team of experts and chartered auctioneers will contact you promptly to provide you with an estimate of the value of your work, as well as ad hoc information about it.

If you are considering selling your work, you will also be accompanied by our specialists in order to benefit from alternatives for selling it at the best possible price.