Audra, Paul (1869-1948)
Discover the other painters of our collection.
The Drawing Master's Son
He was born Célestin-Paul-Rosemond Audra on 25 July 1869 in Valence, in the Drôme. His father Casimir-Rosemond was a drawing teacher who painted both portraits and landscapes, and who gave the boy his first lessons. His grandfather had been a mercer in the same town, established there after coming back from America.
After the lycée at Valence he entered the École des beaux-arts at Lyon in 1887. He stayed one academic year, having been admitted to the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris.
The Studio Where Fauvism Began
In Paris he was admitted to the studio of Gustave Moreau, and worked in the ateliers of Jules-Élie Delaunay and Puvis de Chavannes as well. His fellow students were Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Albert Marquet and Louis Anquetin. He became a friend of Matisse and Rouault.
Moreau's studio was unlike any other in Paris. He told his pupils to find their own way and meant it, and the room produced painters who went in opposite directions from one another. Within a few years of Audra's time there, several of those same students would hang the paintings that a critic christened the cage aux fauves.
Audra showed at the first Salons from 1897, and exhibited at the Salon d'Automne from 1907 to 1920, in the years when that exhibition was the most closely watched in Paris. He was made Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1911.
Nice, and the Friend Who Needed a Studio
He went home first. Back in Valence he succeeded his father as drawing teacher to the municipal schools, opened his own studio, and went on to direct the town's École d'art décoratif et industriel. Then he moved south and took charge of the art school at Nice, where he remained until his death on 2 February 1948, at his home on the avenue de l'Olivetto. He painted the cupola of the church at La Louvesc, in the Ardèche, and made stained glass for a chapel.
It was in Nice that he found Matisse again, his old companion from the Beaux-Arts, and helped him look for a studio. Two men had left the same room thirty years earlier. One was about to paint the most famous interiors of the century. The other ran a school, taught drawing, and helped him find somewhere to work.
The Painting in Our Collection
Still Life with Grapes and Carafe. Oil on canvas, 13 x 9 inches, signed lower right, framed, early 20th century.
A tall carafe stands at the left, pale gold and cream, its stopper a knot of blue-green. To the right, wine-dark grapes fall in a heavy mass, red at the edges and nearly black at the centre. Between them sits a single round fruit in which red and blue are turned over one another until the colours will not separate.
What the handling shows is a man who had stopped drawing. There is no outline anywhere in this canvas: the forms are turned out of colour by short curved strokes circling on themselves, and they hold only because the painter knew when to stop. From a teacher of drawing, whose pupils were drilled in a sure and precise line, that is worth noticing.
Recognising a Paul Audra
He signs Paul Audra, lower right, sometimes with the year beside it. Recorded works run from still life to the townscape, including a market on the quai Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Nice dated 1919 and a portrait of his son Jean from the same year.
Be careful with the name. There is a second French painter called Paul Audra, who lived from 1863 to 1891 and was the son of the pastor Eugène Audra. The two are regularly confused. A work by our Audra will be signed after 1890 and will come out of the world described above; anything given to a Paul Audra who died in 1891 is a different man.
Among the painters in our directory, his nearest neighbour is Pierre Forest (1881-1971), of the same southern generation, who painted the Mediterranean coast for half a century.
Where to See His Work
Audra's most public works are architectural rather than easel paintings. He painted the cupola of the church at La Louvesc, in the Ardèche, and made stained glass for a chapel. His canvases circulate mainly in private hands and on the French market.
Biographical information compiled from published French sources, including the Wikipedia article on the painter and local historical documentation from Valence. Timeline and photograph of the painting: GalerieClub Fine Art.
