Eisenschitz Willy

Willy Eisenschitz, born October 27, 1889 in Vienna (Austria) and died July 8, 1974 in Paris, was a French painter of Austrian Jewish origin. The son of a lawyer, he attended the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1911 before moving to Paris in 1912, where he married Claire Bertrand in 1913. Interned in 1914 as an Austrian subject, he endured the First World War in an internment camp, where his children Evelyn and David were born, and then suffered from tuberculosis. After the war, he discovered the light of the South and settled in La Valette-du-Var in 1927, intensively painting the landscapes of Provence and actively participating in the local artistic life. Exhibiting in the main salons and galleries of Paris, he became a member of the Société nationale des beaux-arts and devoted himself to watercolor from 1931. Naturalized French in 1935, he won the gold medal at the 1937 Universal Exhibition. During the Second World War, he found refuge in Dieulefit to escape anti-Semitic persecution and painted under the pseudonym Villiers. He then resumed his studio in Les Minimes, illustrated books by Jean Giono and Aldous Huxley, and exhibited in France and abroad until the 1970s. Eisenschitz died in Paris in 1974, leaving a body of work largely devoted to Mediterranean landscapes.