Philippe Hainard

The father of Robert Hainard, he was born in the Val de Travers (Neuchâtel) to a father who taught mathematics, natural history and drawing.

In Fleurier, he had an unusual drawing teacher: Eugène Gilliard, a remarkable teacher who, during his stay in Fleurier, had inflamed the pupils of the secondary school (at the time, a child could be seen drawing on every rock), who convinced him to follow him to Geneva to study drawing. And his uncle, Charles-Edouard Guillaume, physicist, metrologist, inventor of the invar and the elinvar, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1920, one year before Albert Einstein, and who introduced him to descriptive geometry, which Philippe taught from 1934 to the architecture students and future drawing teachers.

He married Eugénie Béchard (Bech) in 1905 and the couple had four children: Robert, Béatrice, Claude and Florence. He graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva in 1902 and was appointed Professor of Drawing in 1917. He was always very attentive to the personal and artistic development of his students. His professional and family life was rich and full, but short, as he died at the age of 59.

The City of Geneva acquired a work by Philippe for the posthumous exhibition (1939) at the Musée Rath.