Highlights from the Permanent Collection: The Portraiture of Pierre Daura

Pierre Daura (1896-1976) was born in Menorca, Spain and worked and exhibited in Barcelona and Paris before relocating to the United States in the 1940s. As a young student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona, Daura studied under Pablo Picasso’s father, José Ruiz y Blasco. The painter lived and worked in Paris from 1914-1930 and he married Richmond, Virginia native Louise Blair in 1928. The Daura family moved to Rockbridge Baths, Virginia in 1943 and Pierre Daura served as the Chairman of the Art Department at Lynchburg College and taught at Randolph-Macon Women’s College.

In 2003, the artist’s daughter, Martha Randolph Daura, generously gifted the Taubman Museum of Art a large collection of works by her father including watercolor and oil paintings of portraits, French and Virginian landscapes, and still lifes