Christian Caillard (1899–1985)

Born in Bordeaux on 8 January 1899, Christian Caillard showed an early aptitude for drawing and painting. After the Great War, he moved to Paris and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he trained under the great Post-Impressionist masters.

His first exhibitions at the Salon des Indépendants quickly earned him recognition. The Galerie Bernheim-Jeune welcomed him in the 1920s, establishing his reputation as a portraitist and landscapist. Regular stays in the Basque Country and Provence enriched his luminous and sensuous palette.

Caillard spent the Second World War in Bordeaux before returning to Paris and the South of France in the post-war years. He died in Bordeaux in 1985, leaving a corpus of more than five hundred paintings and watercolours dispersed among public and private collections in France and abroad.