These multifarious activities at the highest level of a man continually searching for new ways to improve the world around him, reflect a permanent concern to be “all things to all men”, and to love others with his artist’s talent right to the end. Plunged into a social circle whose culture was transmitted from generation to generation, George Desvallières developed his talents as an artist, as an orator and as a critic in privileged conditions. Trained in the Italian School, he has left landscapes and portraits of great beauty. His mythological works reflect the concerns and searches of a young artist often tormented. The portraits of London women, sketched from life and exhibited at the first Salon d’Automne (of which he was one of the linchpins) express the internal struggle which inhabited him. He communicates the mystery he perceives in a Pigalle street or in a Paris church through a half-century’s ongoing work branded by his experience of the First World War, by means of his masterful decoration of churches, in his small-scale water-colours, in his lectures on religious art and in his speeches at the Institut. Dazzled by his encounter with Jesus Christ, he demonstrates through the strokes of his paint-brush, in his drawings, in his writings, behind the theatre-curtains he likes to depict in his works, the spiritual universe which he has apprehended [ill. 42]. As a witness of things invisible, he aims to share the beauty he has seen. Faithful to his beloved teacher Gustave Moreau, he reveals “le bel art” [...] which, beneath a material veil that mirrors physical beauty, also reflects the great dashes of the soul, of the spirit, of the heart and of the imagination, and satisfies all those divine needs of humanity of all ages: art is the language of God (65) ”.

Let us allow ourselves to dream a little, and hope that the new generations of the third millennium (that calls itself “spiritual”) will open their eyes and apprehend, through the aesthetic outer cover of this great artist, the message of a witness of two troubled half-centuries, that may help them to progress towards a happier human condition.