Paul Audra, Still Life with Grapes and a Carafe, Signed Oil on Canvas, Early 20th Century, Gilt Frame

Everything in this canvas is turned. The grapes are wound in on themselves in dark red and blue, the carafe rises in loose vertical strokes of cream and gold, and a single round fruit at the centre catches the light where the paint stands highest.

Oil on canvas, 13 x 9 inches (33 x 23 cm), 17 x 14 inches (43 x 36 cm) framed, signed lower right Paul Audra, French School, early twentieth century, in a gilt frame with a lattice-carved outer moulding.

The paint is thick and worked wet into wet. In the grapes the red and the blue never quite mix, so the mass reads as one weight of colour with cooler notes surfacing through it, and the pale ground of the canvas is left visible at the upper right where the brush passed lightly. The carafe is the palest passage and the most loaded, its stopper a knot of blue green sitting well proud of the surface.

Audra came out of Gustave Moreau's studio in Paris alongside Matisse, Rouault and Marquet, and spent his working life teaching drawing, first at Valence and then at the head of the art school in Nice. A fuller account of him is in our directory.

The frame is gilt, with a broad outer moulding carved in a lattice and a plain cove at the sight edge.

The canvas is lined and stable, held on a keyed stretcher. There is a small loss to the paint layer at the upper left.