La marchande de poissons, Genève 1814, Circa 1907

Alexandre Cingria  

Alexandre Cingria, born on March 22, 1879 in Geneva and died on November 8, 1945 in Lausanne, was a painter, decorator, draftsman, art critic and writer from the canton of Vaud.

His father Albert Cingria's family came from Ragusa (today Dubrovnik) and lived in Constantinople, and his mother Caroline Stryjenska (1846-1913), born in Carouge (Geneva), was a painter of French-Polish origin. His younger brother Charles-Albert Cingria (1883-1954) was a writer and musician.

Alexandre Cingria attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva from 1898 to 1900, but was mainly self-taught during his travels abroad, especially in Munich and Paris.

From the beginning of the century, he militated in favor of the renewal of the artistic identity of the French-speaking part of Switzerland. He was the founder of the Saint-Luc and Saint-Maurice group (1919) and the pioneer of the revival of Catholic sacred art in French-speaking Switzerland, where he composed more than 200 stained glass windows for some thirty churches (chapel of the University of Fribourg, etc.). 

His work, influenced by Fauvist painting and Diaghilev's Russian ballets, also benefited from Cubism, understood as a return to the classical tradition. He was one of the founders of the magazine La Voile Latine (1904-1911) and the Cahiers vaudois in 1913.