Man with a Big Hat

The average Manhattan gallerygoer will no longer jump and yell if confronted with an abstract maze or a surrealist swamp. But last week he had something to sigh with relief at: an exhibition as bright, pretty and woodenly realistic as a carrousel. The kale-green landscapes, rosy nudes and white-faced clowns all showed the hand of a contented craftsman. All bore a bold, neatly curlycued signature, Bombois, Clle.

At 64, Camille Bombois is one of Paris' best-selling "primitive" (self-taught) painters. He lives with his wife and their canary in a cosily cluttered little house on the Rue Emile-Desvaux, painting steadily and tidily far into the night, by the light of a big electric lamp. Sometimes he takes a day off to explore the countryside around Paris, armed with a camera. Most of his pictures, including the nudes, are painted from photographs. "I can't be bothered with models," says Bombois, "and anyway my studio is too small for that kind of business."

Willing Loser. Camille was one of twelve children born on his father's river barge. He went to work on a farm at the age of twelve, grew up to be a side show wrestler at country fairs. A straightforward ox of a man, Bombois still has all the complacent assurance that size and strength can impart. Nevertheless, he deliberately lost almost all his wrestling matches. "The crowd was more generous," Bombois explains, "when I let myself be beaten by the local champion. I cashed in on their good will, until once I lost my temper with an opponent and gave him a drubbing. The villagers knocked out three of my teeth and ran me out of town. All I had in my pocket was three francs, and of that I had to pay a doctor two francs 50 centimes for mending my jaw. I gave up wrestling."

Bombois drifted to Paris, married, and found work as a printer's helper. His brother-in-law, who was a watchman at the Louvre, kept urging him to drop over and have a look at the paintings. That was one match he didn't lose deliberately. "Finally I did," says Bombois, "but those guys were too big for me. I've never gone back there."

Sunday Painter. He preferred the sidewalk shows at which Sunday painters sold their pictures for three or four francs apiece. Something told Bombois he could do as well; he tried, and found he could do better. When the dealers brought Bombois' work in off the curb and started selling it against velvet-draped gallery walls, he figured he was ready to set up as a full-time artist.

A man who believes in giving customers their money's worth, Primitive Bombois says proudly that he "never went in for mass production, like Picasso. Why, even today I spend as much as three months on a single picture." He lavished particular care on one canvas in last week's show, entitled "Self-Portrait with the Big Hat" (see cut). "I've always had a weakness for big hats," says Camille Bombois. "More than anything else, they are to me the symbol of our profession."

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