"Blue Gerber Daisies"

Original oil on canvas painting by the American artist Maurice Comprise. Signed top right. Circa 1925. Unlined with mild crackelur mainly in left background. The painting depicts a blue Berber daisy plant in a Art Deco pot. Maurice Compris was born in Amsterdam in 1885 and received his early art education at the Quellinus School and the Royal Academy in his home country. He eventually immigrated to the United States and established himself in New York as a mural painter and furniture designer, but also painted portraits and still life subjects. By the mid-1920s, Compris had moved to the artists’ colony at Rockport, Massachusetts and joined the Rockport Art Association and the North Shore Arts Association, where he was awarded a prize during the 1931 exhibition. The community in Rockport and in nearby Gloucester constituted a tight-knit group of artists and Compris counted many notable painters among his closest friends, including Aldro Hibbard, William Lester Stevens and Emile Gruppe. He played a central part in organizing the Rockport Art Association’s costume balls and was serving as acting Vice President when he passed away in 1939 at only 54 years old. Outside of Massachusetts, Compris showed at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC in 1926 and took part in the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy between 1928 and 1936. Examples of his mural work can still be found in the Public Health Museum (previously the Massachusetts State Infirmary) in Tewksbury and in Our Lady of Good Voyage Church in Gloucester.