"Women only find their portrait likeness when it resembles what they would like to be". Gabriel Domergue

A distant cousin of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the son of a wealthy family, Domergue claimed to have received lessons from Edgar Degas at a young age.

A student of Tony Robert-Fleury and François Flameng, Domergue seemed destined for a career as a landscape painter. In fact, he made his debut at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1906.

Visiting Royan during the season, he chose to capture a few scenes featuring his favorite subject: women. Small paintings executed on the sand of Grande Conche beach in 1908 depict a timeless, disconnected atmosphere, a salon scene on the sand.

In 1911, Domergue received the Prix de Rome and chose a career as a society painter. He then created the archetype of the Parisian woman with a slender neck and a frightened doe-like gaze, which brought him wealth and fame.

In 1938, he produced a composition featuring a young nude woman for the advertising campaign for Rigaud's new perfume, Féerie, and in the same year, he was also a member of the jury for the Miss France contest, as he had been in 1936. 

With success came the decision to leave Montmartre, where he would not return until 1950 to exhibit at his friend André Roussard's gallery.
In 1936, Domergue and his wife, sculptor Odette Maugendre-Villers (1884-1973), had a house built in the Californie-Pezou neighborhood of Cannes.  
After the painter's death in 1962, the property was named "Villa Domergue" by the city of Cannes, and in 1973 it was bequeathed to Odette Domergue in her will. It was listed as a historic monument in 1990.

A member of the Institut de France, Jean-Gabriel Domergue was appointed curator of the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris in 1956. Intelligent and cultured, with a touch of cynicism, he turned this almost abandoned house on Boulevard Haussmann into a hub of Parisian artistic life.

A discerning collector and man of taste, he assembled a fine collection of paintings, which his brother René, an art critic, bequeathed to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux in 1993.