André Grimard (bayonne 1868 – Anglet 1952) The Great Beach Of Biarritz 1880 Watercolor 22x64

André GRIMARD (Bayonne 1868 – Anglet 1952) The Great Beach of Biarritz in 1880 Watercolor monogrammed AG and dated 1880 lower left Dimensions: 22 x 64 cm Born in Bayonne in 1868, André Grimard acquired artistic training at the Julien drawing school (the current École d’Art de la Communauté) where he had Achille Zo as his master. The painters Georges Bergès, Denis Etcheverry and Henri Zo ("the School of Bayonne") were his classmates and friends there. An artist and scholar, passionate about the history of his native city, he studied its monuments and archaeological remains and traveled through the old city, which he revealed through his watercolors, which are as many testimonies of a past whose disappearance he feared. Attracted by the wild coast of Anglet where his family home is located, he painted the lights of the pines and the dunes and the games of his children and nephews. Later he would become interested in the history of Biarritz where his wife's family came from, and would compose from documents, mostly unpublished, a series of watercolors tracing the evolution of the Biarritz coastline from 1830 to 1910. In this watercolor, we can notably distinguish the ancestor of the current casino, the Moorish-style establishment of the Napoleon baths with its covered gallery with arcades connecting over a length of 50 m two pavilions with blue and white domes surmounted by a golden crescent, the Bellevue casino, the church of Sainte-Eugénie and the rock of the Virgin.