Georges Lacombe

Georges Lacombe was born on 18 June 1868 in Versailles, France, to a family that encouraged his early interest in art; his mother, Laure Lacombe, herself a painter and printmaker, gave him his first drawing lessons. He went on to train formally at the Academie Julian in Paris under the academic painters Alfred Roll and Henri Gervex. By 1892 he had joined the circle of artists who called themselves Les Nabis, a group of Post-Impressionist and Symbolist painters that also included Bonnard, Vuillard, and Maurice Denis; sources differ on whether his contact with Paul Serusier began during his studies in Paris or during a stay in Brittany that same year.

Within the Nabis, Lacombe became known chiefly for his sculpture, carving and painting wood reliefs alongside Symbolist paintings of the Breton coast, forests, and rural life. He exhibited at the Salon de la Societe des Artistes Independants in Paris from 1895 onward. He continued to paint and sculpt through the first years of the First World War. During the war he fell ill with tuberculosis, and he died of the disease in Alencon, in the Orne department of France, on 29 June 1916, at the age of forty eight. A retrospective of his paintings, drawings, and sculpture was held at the Galerie Balzac in Paris in 1924, and his work was included in a major survey of the Nabis in Paris in 1955.

Lacombe's critical standing rests on his role as the Nabis' sculptor and on a slow rediscovery across the twentieth century. His 1924 retrospective at the Galerie Balzac in Paris and his inclusion in a major 1955 Nabis survey kept his work in view after his death, and later museum programming, including three separate inclusions in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art between 1960 and 1981 (Art Nouveau; 20 Gifts in Honor of Myron Orlofsky; The Symbolist Aesthetic), placed him within the broader reappraisal of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. Museum biographies and dealer scholarship consistently frame him as a bridge between Nabi painting and decorative sculpture, valued for carrying the group's flattened, symbolic language of the Breton landscape into carved relief. No exact, attributable critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be verified for this profile.

Lacombe's auction market is small and unevenly documented. The best documented recent sale is Portrait de Paul Ranson (1904), which sold for USD 35,600 at Sotheby's New York on 21 November 2025, having previously sold at Christie's for USD 32,200 in 2001. French market sources report higher price levels without full sale details: Estimon'objet cites a wood sculpture, Danse bretonne, sold at auction in 2000 for EUR 227,099, and a painting, Cheval au bas, sold in 2015 for EUR 175,400, but neither source names the auction house or gives an exact sale date. Because those two figures cannot be tied to a documented house or date, they are best read as reported price levels rather than a confirmed auction record. No gallery or estate currently and publicly represents the artist; his work moves almost entirely through auction houses and secondary market platforms such as Artnet, Artsy, and Gazette Drouot.

No catalogue raisonne could be confirmed for Georges Lacombe in the sources reviewed for this profile, so collectors should rely on museum provenance chains, exhibition history, and dealer scholarship rather than a single authoritative catalogue. The market itself is illiquid: public sales are infrequent, the highest reported price levels for a sculpture and a painting in French market sources are not tied to a confirmed auction house or exact date, and the best documented recent transaction, at USD 35,600, is well below those reported levels. Collectors should treat any headline "record" figure for Lacombe with caution until it can be tied to a specific work, house, and date, and should rely on provenance and museum documentation rather than any certification program, since none is confirmed to exist.