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Ad Code: 3
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An example of work by Frank Charles Peyraud
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A hard-working fine-art painter, muralist and panoramist, Frank Peyraud
earned a lasting reputation for
rural landscapes, especially snowscenes in broadly defined forms and
glowing colors. Excepting a trip from 1921 to 1923 to Italy and
Switzerland, he was based in Chicago, where a Registrar of the Chicago
Art Institute in a materials for a traveling exhibition, described him
as the "dean of Chicago landscape artists." (Richter)
Peyraud was one of the first American painters to focus on Midwestern
landscape, and did many river and farm scenes including his signature
snowscapes. Many of his paintings reflected Impressionism, an
abstract style executed with rapid technique and broken brush strokes
brought over from France towards the end of the 19th Century.
Impressionism received much attention in Chicago in some of the artwork
exhibited at the 1893 Exposition.
Of Peyraud and Impressionism, it was written that "he was the most
successful of the progressive Chicago painters who experimented with
impresssionist approaches in the years following Exposition." He
was credited with more discipline of execution than many of his peer
impressionists and with a "valid impressionism", (Greenhouse) that
conveyed poetic interpretations to what many persons regarded as very
ordinary rural Illinois landscape. His snowscene haystack
painting, Winter Light on the Farm, in the Marshall Collection
of Peoria and exhibited at the Terra Museum, shows "crystalline
atmosphere and fleeting light of a waning winter afternoon".
(Greenwood) and seems to reference the serial haystack paintings by
Claude Monet.
Many of Peyraud's works had luminous backlighting, and careful
arrangement of contrasting shapes and a tone inviting the viewer into a
"slightly enchanted world into which quotidian human elements rarely
intrude." (Richter)
Peyraud was born in Bulle, Switzerland, and
enrolled as an architecture student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts
in Paris. In 1881, at age 22, he emigrated to Chicago where he
spent the
remainder of his career. He found employment there as a cyclorama
painter, which meant creating huge panoramic paintings in the round,
"forerunner of the wide-screen motion picture." (Richter). In
1891, he became involved in retouching Paul Phillipoteaux's panorama, The Battle of Gettysburg, when it came to Chicago for exhibition. He continued to work on panoramic and cycloramas spectacles including The Creation for the 1903 Louisiana Exposition. Spring Painted Desert in the Santa Fe Railroad Collection shows at least one trip West.
Peyraud also did mural painting, several of them in Peoria, Illinois
including a series of allegorical murals with Hardesty Maratta in the
Peoria at the newly-built Public Library. In Peoria, he also
taught classes and gave lectures. In 1906, he married Elizabeth
Krysher, a portrait painter and illustrator.
Sources include:
Marianne Richter, Union League Club of Chicago Art Collection, "Frank Charles Peyraud" by Wendy Greenhouse, p. 190.
Wendy Greenhouse, "Frank C. Peyraud", Chicago Modern, 1893-1945, p. 141.
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| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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Frank Peyraud is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exhibition 1915
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