Lithograph by Ramon DILLEY: The elegant women on Deauville beach, signed

  

Title: "The Elegantes at Deauville Beach"
Deauville Beach, Normandy, France.
Technique and support: Lithograph on Arches paper.
Details: Lithograph signed at the bottom right and annotated "Original artist proof 9/10".
Dimensions: 73.5 x 54.5 cm.

Other comments: In good condition, margins very slightly yellowed, but nothing serious (see photos).
Ramon Dilley is a French painter, engraver, lithographer, and illustrator of Spanish origin, born in Madrid in 1932.

Dilley is a pseudonym and the painter's exact identity is Gomez Ramon y Romero. He comes from a family proud to have conquistadors Pizarro and Trujillo as ancestors. The Spanish Civil War forced Gomez Ramon y Romero's parents into exile and they settled in Royan in 1936. The young boy was impressed by the elegant atmosphere of the seaside resort and the wealthy vacationers who frequented it. It was his meeting with sculptor Paul Belmondo that would determine the fate of Gomez Ramon y Romero. Paul Belmondo appreciated his artistic qualities and used his influence to get him into the Louvre School. However, it was as a self-taught artist that the young man approached the world of painting. After an initial contact with Great Painting, where he constantly copied the works of the masters in museums, he traveled the world for two years, from 1965 to 1967. During these two years of wandering, he lived off the product of his paintings.

Back in Paris, he followed the advice of auctioneer Maurice Rheims and took the pseudonym Ramon Dilley. From his first exhibitions, Dilley found his style. The nostalgia of exile and periods of past happiness underlie his creation, where one finds elegant figures from the Thirties and legendary seaside resorts.

Deauville, Trouville, Cannes, Nice are his favorite subjects, and he populates these fashionable beaches with frivolous and carefree characters. This Scott Fitzgerald of painting immediately found success.

Very outgoing, Ramon Dilley sought the clientele of the jet set and the world of cinema. The world of literature also welcomed him, and the painter befriended Mauriac, as well as Giono and Marcel Achard.

In 1968, he met Catherine Deneuve, who introduced him to Claude Chabrol. The director became one of his passionate collectors. But among the fans of Dilley's work are also the Shah of Iran, Prince Rainier of Monaco, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing.

While Dilley's painting is immediately accessible and appeals to fashionable people, to "celebrities" we would say now, it is far from superficial. The man is flamboyant and knows how to charm. But the complex emotions conveyed by his evocations of vanished worlds go straight to the heart. Behind the beautiful images, one can read, of course, sadness and nostalgia, but also desire and tenderness, as well as the will to control one's destiny.