Marsi Paribatra

Biography

Marsi Paribatra’s first solo exhibition took place in 1962 at the Silpa Bhirasri Art Centre in Bangkok. By then she was about thirty, and two doctoral theses were already behind her.

She was born in Bangkok, the only daughter of Prince Chumbhot Paripatra, Prince of Nakhon Sawan. Her year of birth is given differently: 25 August 1931 or 1930. After the Siamese Revolution of 1932 her father left the country, and the girl grew up in Java and England. The family later returned to Thailand, and in 1940 she entered the fourth grade at the Mater Dei school in Bangkok. During the Second World War the school moved to Hua Hin, and she cycled there every day from her father’s country residence.

After the war she studied in Switzerland, France and Spain; at Aiglon College she was reportedly the first female pupil. In 1954 the University of Paris awarded her a Docteur ès lettres for a thesis titled “Le romantisme contemporain”. In 1959 she took a second doctorate, in art history, at the University of Madrid. She is described as the first woman of the Chakri royal house to hold a doctorate. She taught Far Eastern art in Madrid and, after returning to Thailand, lectured for a time on Western art history at Chulalongkorn University.

She gave up teaching for painting. She taught herself: according to accounts, the principles of Renaissance drawing and ways of handling colour were suggested to her by an artist acquaintance, André Poujet.

From 1964 to 1972 she took part in the Salon Comparaisons at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and exhibited with the group l’Art Fantastique. Her early works of the 1960s, mostly black and white, are devoted to stones: the texture of rocks, crystals, the staging of light. These landscapes have been compared to the rocky backgrounds in Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings. In the 1970s the rocks became a setting for figures, while the flowers were painted in ever more varied colours, with less attention to depth. Her main works date from 1980 to 2003. The small canvases show elephants, cats, puppies and bouquets. Among the medium-sized ones are parrots made of flowers (at least five paintings), a lone figure among flowers, a human meeting a unicorn, and pairs of cats among buildings or in the landscape. In the large oil paintings animals, flowers, trees, buildings and people are gathered into a complex architectural composition.

From 1970 she lived permanently in Annot, a small town in the mountains of Haute-Provence, north-east of Nice: she bought a plot on a hillside and built a studio there.

In 2004 a partial paralysis ended her ability to paint. She wanted to set up a charitable foundation in Thailand, but French rules made transferring money difficult; in 2009 her cousin Jisnuson Svasti helped her establish the Marsi Foundation. The foundation’s first exhibition in Thailand took place in 2010.

Marsi Paribatra died at her home in Annot on 9 July 2013. She was cremated at Colomars, near Nice, on 11 July, and part of her ashes was taken to Thailand. In 2016 Thailand’s Ministry of Culture included her among the “Burapa Silapin”, recognised past masters of the visual arts.