Emile Branchard
1881-1938

Emile Branchard was born in Greenwich Village in 1881 where his mother kept a boarding‐house.  After his schooling by French nuns, the young Branchard worked as a truckdriver (horse‐drawn trucks, presumably) and then, during World War I, he became a policeman for the Hofne Defense Force. It was in this latter capacity that he contracted tuberculosis and, confined at home, took up painting, which he combined with his duties around the house. A roomer, impressed by his work, submitted two canvases to the Independents show of 1919, where they were discovered by Stephen Bourgeois who, signing up the artist, showed him steadily until 1932.

For a naive, Branchard painted in a small range of somber, harmonious colors, suggesting that he had osmosed some knowledge by watching his stepfather paint. He had his own perfect pitch as a composer, however. His flat forms with their subtle, undulating contours come close to Symbolist abstraction and the Precisionists artists working in New York.