The Belgian artist Jean Le Mayeur de Merpes was a post-Impressionist artist renowned for his sensualist paintings of Balinese women. Le Mayeur, the son of a painter, was born in Brussels in 1880. At his father’s urging he graduated school as a civil engineer, but soon chose to dedicate his life to painting. He began his artistic career painting Belgian landscapes, and during World War I he was attached to the army to paint battle scenes for austerity. At the end of the war Le Mayeur went abroad, traveling to France, Morocco, Tunisia, Madagascar, India and Cambodia. It is said that Le Mayeur emulated Gauguin in his search of an island utopia, but instead of the French Polynesian culture his predecessor had embraced, he found Bali instead.
Le Mayeur first sailed to Bali in 1932, planning to stay eight months in order to gather artistic inspiration for his exhibition in Singapore the next year. During his stay on the island he was deeply impressed by the Balinese, particularly the legong dance, which was considered among the most classical and elegant of dances in Balinese culture. During this time he met a young Balinese legong dancer named Ni Pollok, who would later become his wife, and muse, and would inspire the sensual images of native Balinese girls depicted in many of his paintings. After his successful exhibition in Singapore in 1933, Le Mayeur decided to repatriate to Bali and build a villa on the coast called Sanur. Tourists visiting Bali during the 1930s sought out La Mayeur’s sanctuary and purchased his paintings, which so adeptly captured Bali and its peoples allure. Le Mayeur flourished in Bali, and his work was exhibited in Singapore in 1937 and 1941, as well Kuala Lumpur, also in 1941. Even when he was placed under house arrest by the Japanese during WWII he continued to produce art, paintings on sacks of rice called “bagor” cloth when faced with a shortage of paper.
At the war’s end La Mayeur continued to draw tourists to Bali, and over the years these buyers would disperse his paintings to galleries and private collections throughout the world. La Mayeur died in 1958 and left the property to Ni Pollok, who lived there until her own death in 1985. After Ni Pollok’s death the house at Sanur became a museum dedicated to the preservation of Le Mayeur’s artwork, where it remains to this day. Le Mayeur’s museum houses 88 paintings on canvas, hardboard, plywood, paper, “bagor” cloth, and several charcoal and photographic portraits. Two of the most exceptional paintings left at Sanur are of Ni Pollok.