Auguste Baillayre

Auguste Baillayre (May 1, 1879–December 16, 1961) was a French-born Romanian painter. He was a professor at École des Beaux-Arts and the first director of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Chișinău.

Biography
Baillayre was born on May 1, 1879 in Béziers, Hérault, where he spent his childhood. After spending his adolescence in Georgia (1885–1898), he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam (1899–1902) and in Saint Petersburg (1903–1907), completing his studies at the University of Grenoble in 1913. He lived in Holland and Russia from 1899 to 1918, and from 1918 to 1943 he became the most important artistic personality in Bessarabia, where he was a professor at the Art School in Chișinău. Several of his works are kept at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Chișinău, whose first director he was in 1939.

In 1907 he married Lidia Arionescu-Baillayre, a painter from Chișinău. They had two daughters, Tatiana, who also became an artist, and Marina. In 1943 he settled in Bucharest, where he died on December 16, 1961, at age 82. His grandson, the photographer Andrei Iliescu, recalls him saying: "Far away from the beloved ones, a stranger among strangers. In Russia I was French, in Holland and France I was Russian, in Romania, French again. Ultimately, alienated from everything and everybody."

Legacy
The Post of Moldova issued, on May 1, 2009, its 9th postal stationery cover with a preprinted stamp commemorating the 130th anniversary of Baillayre. A portrait of the painter appears on the stamp and two of his works, "Still Life with Fish" (1927) and "Self Portrait with Masks" (1945), are also reproduced on the left on the envelope.