Jean-Pierre Laÿs

The career of Jean-Pierre Laÿs is bounded with that of the illustrious Lyon painter Simon Saint-Jean. At the age of sixteen, he worked for him as a servant. He grinned the color pigments, he learnt to prepare the painter’s canvases, took care of his pupils’ supplies and of the flowers which were used as models. The young man was trained as a watercolorist in exchange for work. Simon Saint-Jean was then at the height of his glory. He was the main leader in Flower Painting. His paintings drawn on the heritage of Flemish painters specialized in the genre such as Jan van Huysum and Gerard van Spaendonck. Simon Saint-Jean freed Flower Painting from the grip of the Lyon’s important silk industry. Jean-Pierre Laÿs pursued the same ambition to revaluate Flower Painting in art.

Jean-Pierre Laÿs’ painting is full of symbolic encounters between plants and small monuments referring to moral values which come out his religious piety. 

The compositions of Jean-Pierre Laÿs have always captivated art collectors by their degree of complexity and perfection. The painter who dedicated himself entirely to Flower Painting passed away at his home rue Sainte Hélène in Lyon, aged 62.