New Online Gallery Presents Artist’s Local Scenes
A new online gallery, “Pierre Daura In Rockbridge, 193476,” shows 60 of the famed artist’s works — many never on public display before, and all showing Rockbridge scenes or people, or owned in private Rockbridge collections.
Pierre Daura (1896-1976) lived in Rockbridge Baths for most of his adult life. His works are displayed in Europe and in museums across the United States. The new online gallery is the latest step in an effort to elevate the artist to the same level of recognition in his own home base that he has achieved elsewhere.
The online gallery is available without cost or registration at www.HistoricRockbridge.org.
Eight of the items in the gallery are sculptures, and there is one painting by Daura’s wife, Louise Blair Daura, a wellregarded artist in her own right.
Three American museums contributed works to the online exhibition — the Daura Center at the Georgia Art Museum, which owns 600 works by the artist; the Daura Museum of the University of Lynchburg, which has almost 300, including many sculptures; and the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, which keeps a portion of its 46-painting Daura collection on continual exhibition.
The online exhibition is a project of the “Rockbridge Epilogues” series of historical documents that are not generally available to the public. “Epilogues” is an independent online journal that has the endorsement of Historic Lexington Foundation and the Rockbridge Historical Society.
Most of the Rockbridge-centered works shown in the online gallery depict local scenes, often farms near Rockbridge Baths. Pierre Daura painted those images over and over, and gave them away or sold them for nominal amounts, avoiding commercial galleries.
Daura was born in Catalonia, Spain, in 1896, and married Louise Blair, who was from Richmond, in 1928 when she was a student in Paris. They visited Rockbridge in 1934-35 and moved permanently to Virginia in 1939, after the Span- ish Civil War, in which Pierre fought with the anti-Franco forces. Louise Daura’s family had a summer home in Rockbridge Baths, where they settled before building a home and studio.
AT FAR LEFT is Pierre Daura’s “House Mountain,” no date. The painting can be seen at Carilion Rockbridge Community Hospital, given in memory of Ruth and George William Pultz. AT IMMEDIATE LEFT is “Mohler Barn,” 1941, from the Pierre Daura Study Center at the Georgia Museum of Art, a gift of Martha Daura. BELOW is “Mrs. B. McCluer Gilliam” (Mary Stuart Gilliam), no date, courtesy of Jay Gilliam.
The online gallery accompanies a “Rockbridge Epilogues” article about Daura’s decades in the county, written by Lynn Lowry Leech, who grew up near the Daura family. The gallery project moved ahead with the approval of the Dauras’ daughter, Martha, who spent most of her childhood here but lives today in the American west. She is the donor of many of the paintings that are now in the collections of American museums.
The online gallery focuses only on paintings with a Rockbridge theme or now owned by Rockbridge collectors. More broadly, his works are on display in public museums in Miami, Dallas, Indianapolis, San Antonio, San Diego and other American cities. Internationally, Dauras are in the collections of the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and museums and cathedrals in Spain and France.
