André Brasilier

André Marie Pierre Brasilier was born on 29 October 1929 in Saumur, in the département of Maine-et-Loire. He grew up in an artistic household: his father Jacques Brasilier and uncle Hélie Brasilier were Symbolist-leaning painters, and his mother Alice Chaumont painted as well. His older brother Jean-Marie (1926-2005) became an architect and later won the Premier Grand Prix de Rome in architecture.

School-age talent was clear, but the German Occupation of France interrupted formal progress. When art teaching resumed after the war, he prepared for the national art school path that would take him to Paris.

In 1949 Brasilier entered the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris in the atelier of Maurice Brianchon. The Beaux-Arts training grounded him in composition while he developed a personal, lyrical line.

After winning the Prix de Rome in painting in 1953, he lived at the Villa Medici in Rome from 1954 to 1957 as a pensionnaire of the Académie de France. Those years deepened his contact with Classical and Mediterranean light before a period of travel and his return to France.

Brasilier's early prizes included the Prix Florence-Blumenthal (1952) and the Prix de Rome (1953). A New York solo show in 1962 marked his first major international presentation. Across decades he built a recognisable vocabulary of horses, winter woods, seascapes, musicians and floral still lifes, mixing poetic colour with simplified, expressive drawing.

He worked for the stage as well as the easel: costumes and sets for Ciboulette (Monte-Carlo, 1985) and Mignon (Compiègne, 1992), a large mosaic in Vence (1987), and the decoration of the chapel of Saint-Blaise at Arnac-Pompadour (2008). Retrospectives at Chenonceau (1980), the Musée Picasso in Antibes (1988), the Hermitage (2005) and Museum Haus Ludwig in Saarlouis (2007) confirmed institutional interest. Opera Gallery presented him worldwide; in 2026 he designed the image for the Longines Paris Eiffel Jumping.

Brasilier married Chantal d'Hauterives, sister of the painter Arnaud d'Hauterives. He often said Chantal was his first model and a permanent source of inspiration. German Wikipedia records that the couple had one daughter and two sons; auction and authentication notices name their son Alexis Brasilier in connection with certificates for his paintings.

He kept a Paris studio (visited by Cheval Magazine in August 2026) and remained closely tied to Saumur and to horse culture without claiming to be a competitive rider. Music and domestic still life subjects ran alongside the equestrian themes for which he was best known.

Brasilier described himself as a "transfigurative" painter: for him painting was a transfiguration of reality rather than photographic realism. He sought harmony between plastic construction and emotion, drawing on daily life, nature and memory.

He resisted fashion cycles, returning for decades to horses, winters, coastlines and musicians. In interviews he linked the horse to symbolism, strength and beauty, and treated colour (especially blues and golds in late works) as a carrier of dream and calm rather than documentary fact.

Brasilier's market and museum presence stretched from French provincial museums to the Hermitage. Works entered collections such as the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest. Monographs and catalogues raisonnés by Le Pichon, Bouillot, Harambourg, Kostenevitch and others mapped his production for collectors and scholars.

His horses and winter cavalcades remain the images most associated with his name in auction rooms and gallery retrospectives. The 2026 Paris Eiffel Jumping poster and late studio interviews showed an artist still in public view in his mid-nineties.

Prix Florence-Blumenthal (1952). Premier Grand Prix de Rome in painting (1953). Prix Charles-Morellet of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture (1961). Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2025).

Institutional retrospectives at Chenonceau (1980), Musée Picasso Antibes (1988), the State Hermitage Museum (2005) and Museum Haus Ludwig Saarlouis (2007) functioned as career landmarks even when not prize awards.

Documentaries and gallery films include André Brasilier: Where Dreams Come From (also known as Les Racines du Rêve) and related Opera Gallery studio features. Sotheby's and other houses released expert videos on major canvases such as Grande Fantasia.

A painting by Brasilier was used as cover art for Daniela Krien's novel Der Brand (2021). Equestrian media followed him as the author of the 2026 Paris Eiffel Jumping image. His official website andrebrasilier.com and Opera Gallery pages remain primary public references for biography and works.

No major public controversies are documented in the principal Wikipedia biographies or gallery obituaries reviewed for this profile. Critical debate around his work more often concerns taste and market fashion (lyrical figurative painting versus contemporary trends) than personal scandal.

André Brasilier died in Paris in September 2026 at the age of 96. English and French Wikipedia state 4 September 2026; La Gazette Drouot (14 September 2026) and German Wikipedia state 8 September 2026. Opera Gallery announced that he lived and worked in Paris until his passing in September 2026.

A funeral ceremony associated with Loupeigne was reported in French death-notice listings later in September. Cause of death was not made public in the sources used here.