Georges de Feure

Georges de Feure was the professional pseudonym of Georges Joseph van Sluijters, born in Paris on 6 September 1868. His family moved to The Hague around 1870, and he grew up in the Netherlands. He left school at 14 and in 1886 was briefly admitted to the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Sources disagree on how long he stayed, some say two days, others two years, before he left without completing formal training, and he is generally considered self-taught.

Back in Paris in the early 1890s, he allied himself with the Symbolist movement, showing at the Exposition des Peintres Impressionistes et Symbolistes at the Galerie Le Barc de Boutteville alongside Paul Gauguin and the Nabis. He exhibited at the Salons de la Rose+Croix in 1893 and 1894, at the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1894, and held a solo exhibition of watercolours that same year at the Galerie des Artistes modernes in Paris. In 1896 his paintings were shown at the Munich Secession.

His career reached its highest public visibility through his association with the dealer Siegfried Bing. For the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris, Bing commissioned de Feure to decorate the facade and design two suites of furniture for the Pavillon de l'Art Nouveau, a high-profile commission that extended his practice into furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles, and posters. He continued to take major decorative commissions in later life, including the 1922 decoration of the Paris studio of the couturiere Madeleine Vionnet.

De Feure died in Paris on 26 November 1943, during the German Occupation, at the age of 75. Some sources place his burial at the Cimetiere des Batignolles in Paris, though this detail carries lower confidence than his core biographical dates.

De Feure's reputation rests on his range across Symbolist painting, poster design, and Art Nouveau decorative arts, and on his prominent place in Siegfried Bing's promotion of the style at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. The specialist dealer Stephen Ongpin Fine Art highlights his standing among the most Art Nouveau of the Symbolist painters and the prominence of his 1900 pavilion work for Bing. His posters and prints appear in the Symbolism and Art Nouveau exhibition history of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his paintings, glass, and furniture continue to be shown and studied at institutions including the Musee d'Orsay, the Rijksmuseum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

De Feure's auction market spans decorative furniture, prints, and posters as well as Symbolist paintings, and results vary widely by category. Market-data aggregators report the highest price ever recorded for his work as approximately EUR 360,000 (about USD 380,000) for the painting Woman with an Iris, sold at Sotheby's Paris on 13 November 2024; this figure is broadly consistent with a separately reported market ceiling near USD 386,000, but it has not been independently confirmed against Sotheby's own sale record, so it should be treated as the best documented rather than a certainty-confirmed result. In the decorative-arts segment, an armchair from the furniture he designed for Siegfried Bing's L'Art Nouveau Pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle sold for USD 27,940 at Phillips in New York on 15 December 2010. Most other tracked sales, including works recorded by Heritage Auctions, have realized far more modest prices, often from the low hundreds to the low thousands of dollars, reflecting a market weighted toward decorative multiples rather than unique paintings.

No published catalogue raisonne has been identified for de Feure, so attribution should rely on museum comparanda, exhibition history, and dealer archives rather than a single reference catalogue. His market is not concentrated in one gallery or estate; specialist secondary market dealers such as Stephen Ongpin Fine Art in London and Galerie Martynoff in France actively handle his work, but neither functions as an exclusive representative. Because decorative reproductions and prints of his Art Nouveau posters circulate widely at low price points, collectors should distinguish period works and documented decorative commissions, such as the Bing pavilion furniture, from later reproductions before relying on price comparisons.