Raphael Delorme was a French painter who lived from 1885 to 1962. He seems to be relatively obscure to the world at large; there is no article about him on the English-language Wikipedia; his entry on the French-language Wikipedia is very brief, nearly a stub. At any rate, his style is quite distinctive; his paintings are pretty typical art deco, with stout-bodied nudes and themes connected with history and antiquity, often depicting liminal spaces with a good dose of mythology/fantasy/Surrealism thrown in. See for example this painting, entitled “A Nymph and the Birth of Venus in the Background.”
There is one painting of his that actually introduced me to his art and that, much as I have tried on Google, I have not been able to find again. Let me describe it. It’s one of his more Surrealist images and as I recall shows a sea flowing into a chequed-tiled floor or pavement, on or beside which there is a big bush shaped like a man’s head; the leaves of the bush form his hair. Beside the bush, there are also two roughly teen-age girls, and as I recall, there is something disjointed about their bodies, maybe their torsos are invisible, or something like that.
I’m trying here on the off-chance that someone might recognize which painting I am talking about.
How I got acquainted with this picture is an interesting story. When I was 11, my mother wanted me to try to get into this exclusive semi-private school called the University of Toronto Schools. This is a school for very disciplined, academically-minded kids, I would almost say for supernerds (in Margaret Atwood’s novel “Cat’s Eye”, the protagonist’s genius brother ends up going there). In order to apply, you had to write three entrance tests: math, reading comprehension, and writing. My mother taught me algebra, which we weren’t doing in school yet in grade 6; I then went to write the actual test, and found it practically impossible to complete. I recognized almost none of the math, which must have been based on at least the grade 9 curriculum, so I just tried to improvise something. The reading comprehension test would also have been challenging, to say the least, and the written test contained only a photocopy of the aforesaid painting, with an instruction to write an essay about it. Nothing else. I don’t know what I wrote, but it probably wasn’t very intellectual. I did look over at what another kid was writing, and noted the title, which was something like “Not Exactly Picture Perfect”. Perhaps he had better ideas/more motivation than I did. Needless to say, I was not accepted to UTS, which, I think, had to make the tests deliberately difficult as they could only accept maybe 75 applicants for the next school year.
As an adult, I saw the painting again in an art store catalog, and noted the name of the artist - Raphael Delorme. But I don’t remember the title of the painting, and haven’t been able to find it anywhere again.