Maurice Boitel

Maurice Boitel (July 31, 1919 – August 11, 2007) was a French painter.

Boitel belonged to the art movement called "La Jeune Peinture" ("Young Picture") of the School of Paris, with painters like Bernard Buffet, Yves Brayer, Jansem, Louis Vuillermoz, Pierre-Henry, Daniel du Janerand, Gaston Sébire, Paul Collomb, Jean Monneret, Jean Joyet and Gaëtan de Rosnay.

He was born in Tillières-sur-Avre, Eure département, in Normandy, from a Picard lawyer father, a member of the Saint Francis third order, and from a Parisian mother, of Burgundian ancestry. Until the age of twelve Maurice Boitel lived in Burgundy at Gevrey-Chambertin. In this beautiful province his art reflected his major love of nature, and also the feeling of joie de vivre expressed in his works. He began drawing at the age of five.

Boitel studied at the Fine Arts schools of Boulogne-sur-Mer and of Amiens, cities where his parents lived for a few years. Then his family came back to Burgundy, to Nuits-Saint-Georges. He studied at the Fine Arts Academy of Dijon before fighting in a mountain light infantry platoon at the beginning of World War II.

He successfully sat the competitive examination to enter the National Academy of Fine Arts École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris). In 1942 and 1943, during the most difficult period of the German occupation, in his studio located in the center of Paris he hid Jewish refugees, among them the journalist Henry Jelinek.

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