Franz WALDRAFF

(Tuttlingen 1878 - Nice 1961)

Design for a Stained Glass Decoration, with a Pair of Peacocks in a Garden

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Gouache and watercolour, over pen and black ink, with framing lines in yellow watercolour.
Signed FWff. at the lower right.
172 x 214 mm. (6 3/4 x 8 3/8 in.)
This is a design for a stained glass decoration. In the first quarter of the 20th century, Franz Waldraff collaborated with the leading glass painter Félix Gaudin (1851-1930), who also often worked with Eugéne Grasset. At the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1906, Gaudin exhibited a stained glass panel decoration, designed by Waldraff, entitled Les paons (The Peacocks), for which the present sheet is a preparatory study. The glass panel has been lost or destroyed, but is recorded in an old photograph, as is a maquette for the same work by Waldraff2. The decoration, made up of nine panels, is believed to have been intended for the residence of a Sr. Cousino of Santiago, Chile. Cousino is known to have admired Waldraff’s work, since he is documented as having commissioned seven cartoons for other windows from the artist.



Two further designs by Waldraff for stained glass panels painted by Gaudin, one a View of Alsace of c.1912 and the other a Garden with Statues by a Fountain of c.1914, are illustrated in a recent monograph on the work of Félix Gaudin.









The German decorative painter, designer and illustrator Franz Waldraff studied in Düsseldorf before moving to Paris in 1902. He exhibited at the Salons between 1903 and 1909, and at the Salons of the Société des artistes décorateurs between 1910 and 1914. At the gallery La Maison Moderne he met the French designer and peintre-décorateur Clément Mère (1861-1940), and the two artists soon began working in partnership. Mère produced furniture and objects in wood, ivory and precious metals after Waldraff’s designs or decorated by him; several collaborative pieces are today in the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Waldraff also designed silk brocades that were manufactured in Lyon for several Parisian fashion houses, as well as producing book illustrations, designs for stained glass panels, and decorations for a hôtel particulier on the Champ de Mars in Paris. Among his drawings are numerous decorative designs, as well as watercolours of, and inspired by, the dancer Isadora Duncan. Waldraff later settled in Menton in the South of France; although he is often said to have died there just before the Second World War, it has been claimed by a descendant that he in fact died much later, in Nice in 1961.

Franz WALDRAFF

Design for a Stained Glass Decoration, with a Pair of Peacocks in a Garden