Pierre Daura

PIERRE DAURA (Ciudadela, Menorca, 1896 - Rockbridge Baths, Virginia, 1976).
"Rockbridge Baths Landscape," c 1935.
Oil on canvas.
Measurements: 50 x 57 cm; 73 x 80 cm (frame).

His father was a musician and textile merchant in Barcelona. His mother died when the artist was seven years old. He studied at the school of fine arts in Barcelona, La Llotja, where he was taught by Picasso's father, José Ruiz Blanco. At the age of fourteen he exhibited and sold his first works. At eighteen he went to Paris, where he stayed, in the middle of the war, until 1917, then he worked in the studio of the painter Émile Bernard and learned engraving with André Lambert, the editor and illustrator of the magazine Janus. He returned to Barcelona and participated in the group of Catalan artists with whom he exhibited from 1918 to 1933 throughout Europe. In 1920 he returned to Paris where he made friends with the Catalan painter Pierre Creixams and the Argentine artist Gustavo Cochet. He exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1922 and 1926. In 1928, along with four other artists rejected at the Salon, he participated in the exhibition "Five Artists Rejected by the Salon Jury" at the Marck Gallery.