Henri De Waroquier 'Mask', France, 1914

Henry de Waroquier, painter, sculptor and printmaker, was born in Paris in 1881. He studied in Paris at the School of Decorative Arts, and privately with the architect Charles Genuys and the painter and scholar Louis Ménard. In 1903, he was named professor of composition at the Estienne School of Art and Industry in Paris. He often traveled to Venice and did a number of paintings, drawings and etchings of that city. de Waroquier exhibited prominently in the annual Salon exhibitions in Paris, most notably in the Salon d’Automne, of which he eventually became president, and in the Salon des Tuilleries and the Salon des Artistes Indépendants. He had many one-man shows in Paris and elsewhere. In 1946, the museum in Zurich mounted an extensive retrospective of his work, and in 1952 the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris held an exhibition of fifty of his sculptures. In 1955, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris put on an exhibition of his engravings. De Waroquier’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Museum of the 1930s in Boulgone-Billancourt.