Paintings and Drawings by Peter de Francia
Peter Laurent de Francia was a French-born British artist, who served as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, from 1972 to 1986. He was the author of two books on Fernand Leger: Leger: The Great Parade (Painters on Painting) (1969) and Fernand Léger (1983).
Brought up “mostly by servants” in Paris, Peter de Francia was the only child of a wealthy corporate lawyer of Genoese descent and his English wife. He attended the Brussels Academy and, after four years in the army, the Slade. However, his real education was in Italy, in the reawakening of neo-Realism and in the studio of the Communist artist Renato Guttuso, whose denunciatory drawings ‘Got Mit Uns’ were a lifelong influence. When de Francia arrived in England in 1940, he knew almost no one. He would remain for more than 60 years a Displaced Person, fundamentally opposed to all the British art establishment stood for.
Peter de Francia met both Beckmann and Grosz in New York in 1950. His identification with the late figure compositions of Léger was evident in his impassioned essay on The Great Parade, published in the RCA’s “Painters on Painting” series in 1969. Those three artists all pointed towards linearity; and it was in large-scale complex charcoal drawings, rather than paintings, that de Francia found his mature expression.