# Looking for a painting by artist Raphael Delorme **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** arts-crafts\ **Created:** [October 16, 2022, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-painting-by-artist-raphael-delorme/973333 "2022-10-16T14:15:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![themapleleaf](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/themapleleaf/32/14349_2.png) [@themapleleaf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/themapleleaf)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2022, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-painting-by-artist-raphael-delorme/973333/1 "2022-10-16T14:15:29Z")
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](https://www.art.salon/artwork/raphael-delorme_une-nymphe-et-la-naissance-de-venus-en-arriere-plan_AID49635), 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.