Xavier de Maistre

Xavier de Maistre , 1763-1852, French writer, b. Savoy; brother of Joseph de Maistre. He served in the Russian army and lived most of his life in St. Petersburg. His works are distinguished for their polished wit. Voyage autour de ma chambre [trip around my room] (1794), written when he was in prison for dueling, is a simple peregrination from object to object allowing each to call up recollections. Le Lépreux de la cité d'Aoste [the leper of Aosta] (1811) is a dialogue between a soldier and a leper, notable for its portrayal of Christian resignation. La Jeune Sibérienne [the Siberian girl] is the story of a plea of a Russian girl to the czar for mercy for her father in Siberia.

de Maistre, Joseph (1753–1821), French Ultramontane writer. He was influenced by 18th-cent. rationalism, but after the 1789 Revolution he became a reactionary, who saw in the Church the safeguard of political stability. In his main work, Du pape (1819), he argued that the only true basis of society lay in authority, which took the double form of spiritual authority vested in the Papacy and temporal authority in human kings. His ideas contributed to the overthrow of Gallicanism.

Maistre, Roy de (1894–1968). Australian painter, active mainly in England. He was born at Bowral, New South Wales, and studied at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales and Sydney Art School. De Maistre also studied music at the Sydney Conservatorium and throughout his career he was interested in the analogy between colour combinations and musical harmony. This led him to early experiments with abstraction with Roland Wakelin; they produced the earliest abstracts painted in Australia, but only one survives—de Maistre's Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1919). Between 1923 and 1928 he lived in Europe, mainly France, and returned to Europe permanently in 1930, settling in London after a brief period of residence in France. He became a friend of Francis Bacon and in the 1930s he ran an art school in London with Martin Bloch (1883–1954). After the Second World War (in which he worked for the Red Cross) he exhibited widely. He painted portraits, interiors, still-life, and religious subjects (he became a convert to Roman Catholicism in 1949) in a style that Sir John Rothenstein characterized as ‘reticent but extremely complex'. Cubism was one of the major influences on his eclectic style. There are several examples of his work in the Tate Gallery, London.