Pierre Laprade

Pierre Laprade — born François Pierre Coffinhal-Laprade in Narbonne in 1875 and who died in Fontenay-aux-Roses — was a French artist of remarkable range, working across painting, watercolor, engraving, illustration, tapestry cartoon design, ceramic painting, and theatre decoration. He trained first with Marre in Montauban before moving to Paris, where he studied with the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. His public exhibition life began early: he showed at the Salon des indépendants from 1901 and appeared at the Salon d'Automne in 1905, and in 1913 his work crossed the Atlantic as part of the landmark Armory Show in New York. His primary gallery relationship in the years that followed was with Galerie Druet in Paris, where he held solo exhibitions in 1907, 1909, and 1911, and he later exhibited at Galerie Larock-Granoff in 1926.

Laprade's subjects gravitated consistently toward the intimate and the cultivated: domestic interiors, figures in repose, gardens, flowers, and the architectural fabric of French and Italian landscapes. Works held at the Centre Pompidou trace this sensibility across three decades — from Le manteau rouge (c. 1903) and Femme à l'estampe (c. 1904) through the garden and interior paintings of 1919, including Les blés, acquired by the French state that same year, and Les jardins de Versailles, to the reclining nude Nu couché (1922) and the floral still life Coquelicots et marguerites (c. 1925). His early watercolor Les jardins Boboli à Florence (1906), also at the Centre Pompidou, signals the travel-derived landscape observation that would persist throughout his career, finding a later counterpart in Landscape with Church on Hill (c. 1920), a watercolor, graphite, and charcoal work on paper now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Vue de Paris (c. 1920), an oil on canvas at the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon, and Woman with Roses (1928), at the Pola Museum in Hakone, further attest to the international institutional reach of his work.

Beyond painting, Laprade made a significant contribution to French graphic culture through his etchings for Paul Verlaine's Les Fêtes galantes, produced in 1923 and 1925 in collaboration with the publisher Ambroise Vollard — a project that placed him within the distinguished tradition of the livre d'artiste. In his final years he turned sustained attention to architectural subjects, producing the painting series Les Églises and Les Cathédrales in 1925, transforming monumental religious buildings into vehicles for decorative pictorial invention. His work is held in public collections including the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, with provenance documentation connecting his paintings to Galerie Durand-Ruel and to state acquisition records stretching back to the early twentieth century. The year 2025 marks the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth.