Home›Painters and their masters›Biography of Peraire, Paul Emmanuel (1829–1893)
Peraire, Paul Emmanuel (1829–1893)
Paul Emmanuel Peraire was born into a family of stockbrokers and spent his early manhood in the family trade. A conviction in 1859 ended that life. He turned to painting, and from 1866 until his death he exhibited at the Paris Salon every single year, twenty-seven of them without a gap.
| 1829 | 1859 | 1866 | 1879 | 1893 |
| Born at Bordeauxinto a family of stockbrokers | Leaves the Boursethe coulissiers affair | Salon debutand every year after | Bought by the StateLe Moulin des Andelys | Dies in Montmartreaged sixty-three |
Pupil of Eugène Isabey · Salon medal in 1880 · Vienna international exhibition in 1882
Bordeaux Museum of Fine Arts / Musée Salies / Bought by the French State
A listed artist
He trained under two established masters, Eugène Isabey, the great Romantic painter of coasts and harbours, and Évariste Vital Luminais, and made his Salon debut in 1866 with a river subject, L'Île de Croissy à Bougival.
From that year until his death he showed at the Salon des Artistes Français every single year, a run of more than a quarter of a century. In 1880 he took a third-class medal for La Seine à Saint-Denis, and in 1882 he represented French landscape abroad at the international exhibition in Vienna.
Born to the Bourse
He was born in Bordeaux on 12 September 1829, into a family of agents de change of Portuguese Jewish origin. His grandfather Abraham had settled in the city after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, and his father David practised the family trade. Paul was expected to follow, and for years he did, working in finance while the great landscape revolution of Corot, Daubigny and the Barbizon painters unfolded around him. In 1857 he married Marie Jeanne Hortense Bailleul in Montmartre, where the couple would raise three children.
1859
He was caught up in the affair of the coulissiers, the unofficial curb brokers who traded outside the regulated Paris Bourse and who were prosecuted that year. Convicted in the case, he left finance entirely.
He was thirty. What he did next was not a retreat. He entered a painter's training, and made his Salon debut six years later. He was thirty-six years old, and he had begun again.
Twenty-Seven Salons
His submissions read like a map of the waterways of the Île-de-France. Sur la butte Montmartre in 1875, La Seine à Saint-Denis in 1880, Terrains blancs à Saint-Ouen in 1885, L'Étang du grand veneur in 1889.
In 1879 the French State purchased Le Moulin des Andelys directly from the Salon and deposited it at the Bordeaux Museum of Fine Arts, the museum of his native city.
He spent his whole painting life at 46 rue Lepic, in the years when the Butte was still half village and half city, the very slopes he had shown at the Salon of 1875. He exhibited one last time in 1892, the year he painted Un coup de vent, now in the Musée Salies at Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and died at home in Montmartre on 21 January 1893, aged sixty-three. His studio sale was held at the Hôtel Drouot, and the rue Lepic studio itself was later taken over by the Fauve painter Charles Camoin.
Recognising a Peraire
His early Salon canvases were large and classically finished, in the polished manner juries expected. As he matured the touch thickened, the palette grew deeper and more tonal, and he turned increasingly to smaller formats on wood panel. It is in those later works that his true affinities show, the silvery river light of Corot, and above all the broad, moist handling of Charles-François Daubigny. The subjects to look for are the Seine, the Oise and the Marne, the countryside around Montmartre and Saint-Denis before the city swallowed it, Normandy coasts, and in his later years farm and pond scenes handled with a freedom that borders on the pre-Impressionist. Works are signed "P. Peraire" in a lower corner.
Peraire belongs to the solid second rank of the Barbizon School, the painters who carried the manner of Corot and Daubigny through the last decades of the century with complete conviction. Two of his contemporaries are in our directory, Adolphe Félix Cals and James Desvarreux-Larpenteur.
Where to See His Work
Peraire hangs in French public collections, including the Bordeaux Museum of Fine Arts, which holds Le Moulin des Andelys bought by the State at the Salon of 1879, and the Musée Salies at Bagnères-de-Bigorre, which holds Un coup de vent of 1892. He is recorded in the artist repertories of the Musée d'Orsay and of the Louvre's department of graphic arts. His work appears regularly at auction in France, Germany and the United States, with more than a hundred recorded results, the sign of a steady market for a listed artist.
Biographical information compiled from the artist repertories of the Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre, the Bordeaux Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée Salies, and published reference sources including Bénézit. Photographs of the painting by GalerieClub Fine Art.
