William Julien Émile Édouard LAPARRA
 (Bordeaux, 1873 – Hecho, Spain, 1920)


 Portrait of a little girl in an interior

 Oil on canvas
 Signed and dated 1911 lower left
 58.5 x 48 cm
 Exhibition :
  
 Possibly the 1911 Mulhouse Salon under number 200, entitled Looking Back
 From a family of artists, his brother Raoul being a musician, he, a painter, etcher and designer, William LAPARRA followed the teachings of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Bordeaux from 1888 to 1891 with E. PIGANEAU, F. SAUNIER and Ch. LAPARRA then went up to Paris and entered the Académie Julian in 1892 where he himself would become a professor a little later. He was the student there of Jules LEFEBVRE, William BOUGUEREAU and Tony ROBERT-FLEURY.

 He exhibited during his career at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1899 until his death and became a member in 1905.

 He also exhibited very regularly in provincial salons, including, among others, Rouen, Le Havre and Mulhouse where our portrait was possibly exhibited in 1911.

 LAPARRA's academic career was a real success. He won the first second grand prix de Rome in 1894 with Judith and Holofernes. The supreme consecration of the first grand prix de Rome would come to him four years later in 1898 with La piscine de Bethsaïda. He was then 25 years old. This did not prevent him from continuing to exhibit at the Salon and accumulating awards: third medal at the 1899 Salon with a Portrait of an aïeule, second medal in 1903 for a triptych on Job…

 From 1899 to 1902, he stayed at the Académie de France in Rome. He took the opportunity to visit Genoa, La Spezzia, Pisa, Florence, Perugia, Paestum, Pompeii, Capri, Sicily and Venice, then Greece and Egypt. Son of a Spaniard, LAPARRA also returned to the lands of his ancestors during several trips to Spain.

 He settled in Boulogne-Billancourt around 1910, where he became friends with the sculptor Paul LANDOWSKI – whose sister he married in his first marriage – and with the Spanish painter Ignacio ZUOLAGA, whom he met in Paris and who influenced him from then on.

 LAPARRA married for the second time Miss Fanny BERTRAND with whom they had a son Jacques Olivier (1910-1940) who was himself a painter.

 His fame did not prevent him from being an artist in tune with the humanist thoughts of his time. Sensitive to the upheavals of his time, he offered one of his major works, Les étapes de Jacques Bonhomme (Triptych symbolizing the three forms of social protest through violence, thought and love), to the Albi workers' glassworks, the first workers' cooperative in France. He also devoted some watercolors and washes dated from the summer of 1916 to the events that took place on the Somme and Aisne fronts during the First World War.

 LAPARRA excels in highlighting the character of the people he paints in a thick and rich material. Thanks to his rare abilities, he has been able to build a successful career as an official painter, sometimes using symbols, but never sacrificing his gifts for beautiful material and his ability to translate expression through drawing.

 His work was the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including that of Bordeaux in 1997.

 Museums : Aurillac, Bordeaux, Caen, Château-Thierry, Nantes, Paris (Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum, Mod Art Museum), Pau, Roubaix…