Gustav Adolf MOSSA (Nice, 1883 - 1971) Flora Pen and brown ink, watercolor, gouache 29 x 15.5 cm Studio stamp lower left Number in ink above the stamp: 3618 Circa 1902 This drawing, from the artist's family, has been authenticated by Professor Jean-Roger Soubiran, a specialist in the artist's work. Son and pupil of the painter Alexis Mossa, Gustav Adolf is a strange star in the sky of Symbolism. His creative phase lasted only about fifteen years, corresponding to his youth. During this period, he quietly cultivated in his inner garden hallucinatory clumps of "flowers of Evil", painting morbid legends where cruelty, voluptuousness and death triumph; precious images like Byzantine mosaics where femmes fatales with skull-shaped jewels bask on the heap of their victims; where human beings seem confounded in vice and splendor. After this interval, which ended with the outbreak of the First World War, the artist returned to the life of a notable provincial and became curator of the Nice museum. Dating from the artist's early years, and predating this macabre imagination, our watercolor reflects the influence of Gustave Moreau, whom Mossa discovered in Paris at the 1900 Universal Exhibition. Our composition is similar to a poster Mossa designed for the Côte d'Azur in 1902.