André Raffray

André Raffray was born in Nonancourt (Upper Normandy) in 1925 and died in Paris in 2010. From 1953 to 1982, he worked as an illustrator for the Gaumont Company and entered the world of fine art in 1977, when the Pompidou Centre asked him to produce an illustrated life of Marcel Duchamp, an artist who fascinated him. Hugely enthusiastic about painting, he began an intense period of work as a copyist, reproducing in coloured pencil the works of the masters. He started with landscapes by Seurat and Constable, seeking out the sites where the works were produced, before moving on to Matisse and Picasso. Re-appropriated, started again from scratch and confronted with photos of the original site, the paintings become doubles of themselves.

In 2012, the Semiose Gallery in Paris exhibited a series of gouaches created for the credits of the TV series Les Brigades du Tigre. His work can be seen in the collections of the Brittany FRAC, the Pompidou Centre and the Musée des beaux-Arts in Rouen, which held a retrospective of his work in 2005. He is represented in New York by Moeller Fine Art.