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FRANCIS GRÜBER (France, 1912-1948) . "Character with a walking stick". Watercolour and charcoal on paper. Signed in the lower right corner. Size: 66 x 45 cm; 81 x 61,5 cm (frame). French painter founder of the Nouveau Réalisme School, Francis Grüber was the son of the acclaimed stained glass artist Jacques Grüber. His style was influenced by Bosch, Albrecht Dürer and the Lorraine engraver Jacques Callot. He became friends with the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti and met the important artistic figure Goerges Braque. In 1914 he moved to Paris, where he enjoyed a new period of artistic acclaim during the Art Deco period. With his father's help, he exhibited from the age of 18 at the Salons d'Automne and the Salons des Tuileries. The Musée du Luxembourg acquired a still life by Gruber, when the artist was only 20 years old. His first solo exhibition took place at the Académie Ranson in 1936. After his father's death in the same year, he took over his large studio in the Villa d'Alésia. There he grew up close to his neighbours, Alberto and Diego Giacometti. Gruber was famous in Montparnasse, both for his exuberance and his intemperate lifestyle. He was a passionate young man, whose leftist convictions inspired his belief that art and social progress should go hand in hand. His realist painting underwent a clear evolution from depicting love to dealing with social themes, as in Hommage au travail, death, as in Splendeur et sépulture "Splendour and the Grave", or the condition of the artist and the writer, as in Le Poète, Hommage à Rimbaud "The Poet, Homage to Rimbaud", Hommage à Jacques Callot "Homage to Jacques Callot", both from 1942. Grüber's last period was characterised by tuberculosis. He died shortly after achieving national recognition in France. He was admired for some years, as evidenced by the major retrospective of his work mounted by the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1950. He became an iconic figure in the Salon des jeunes peintres, as the original exponent of miserabilism: a style revived, though not equalled, by painters such as Bernard Buffet and Paul Rebeyrolle.