Andrieux, Alfred Louis (1879-1945)

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Alfred Louis Andrieux was born in 1879 into one of the strangest households of the Third Republic, his father prefect of police of Paris, his mother a Koechlin heiress, his unacknowledged half-brother the poet Louis Aragon, and he spent his life painting snow, animals and the open air, leaving almost a thousand works and hardly any biography.

Born the Year His Father Took the Prefecture

He was born in Paris in 1879, the year Louis Andrieux (1840-1931) was appointed prefect of police of the city. His father was a figure of the age. Lawyer, public prosecutor, prefect, deputy, ambassador of France to Spain, journalist, writer. His mother, Hélène Koechlin, came from the great Alsatian industrial dynasty, and his parents had married the year before.

Eighteen years later, from a liaison his father never acknowledged, a second son was born and given an invented surname, taken from the country where the father had served as ambassador. Louis Aragon, who would help found Surrealism. Aragon was told the truth about his parentage only at nineteen, as he left for the front. Alfred had the name and the household. His half-brother had neither, and became the famous one.

Almost a Thousand Works

Very little is recorded of his training. What survives instead is the work, a studio archive running from 1900 to 1944, twenty-nine sketchbooks and some nine hundred and eighty-six original pieces, of which a hundred and eighty-two are oils, six hundred and forty-one drawings, and the rest watercolours, gouaches and pastels. It is the record of a man who painted almost every day for forty-four years.

He worked in the Post-Impressionist line that carried plein-air landscape into the twentieth century, and specialised in two things. Animal and hunting subjects, as both painter and illustrator, and landscape, above all mountains and snow, painted directly from nature.

The Salon and Vence

He was a member of the Société des Artistes Français and showed at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913, the great open salon of the Parisian avant-garde years. Later he was attached to the artists' colony of Vence, the Provençal hill town that drew so many painters between the wars. His work entered public collections in his lifetime, including the Lytham St Annes Art Collection in England, which holds his A Lady Seated on a Balcony. He died in 1945, aged sixty-six.

Recognising an Andrieux

The subjects to look for are snow and mountain landscapes, hunting scenes, and animals, the two specialities in which he worked as both painter and illustrator. The handling is Post-Impressionist and direct, painted from nature, with the full colour of the Impressionist palette rather than the tonal browns of the academic tradition. His snow is the test. Never flat, always built in blues, violets and creamy yellows following the ground. Works are signed "A. Andrieux" or simply "Andrieux", most often in a lower corner.

One caution. The surname is common, and dealer listings sometimes confuse him with other painters called Andrieux, including entries that muddle his parentage. The dates 1879-1945 and the snow and hunting subjects settle it.

Andrieux belongs to the territory we explore in our guide to French Impressionist landscape painting beyond the famous names. Two of his forerunners are in our directory, Adolphe Félix Cals and Paul Emmanuel Peraire.

Where to See His Work

Andrieux is held in the Lytham St Annes Art Collection of Fylde Borough Council in England, recorded on Art UK, and documented in the authority files of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in the standard auction repertories. His studio archive of almost a thousand works survives intact, and his paintings come to the market regularly in France.

Biographical information compiled from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Art UK, the surviving studio archive of the artist, and published reference sources. Photographs of the painting by GalerieClub Fine Art.