[2] The brothers, François, Aimé, Aurèle and Charles, were largely self-taught artists having been raised as professional plasterers and house painters.

[3] Encouraged by the success of the exhibitions he left Switzerland in 1922, and moved to Reims in France where he worked as a house painter for two years.

[1][4] François Barraud painted mainly still lifes, female nudes and portraits, including several double portraits of himself and his wife, Marie[2][5] His precise, realist style of painting developed under the influence of the old Flemish and French masters he had studied at the Louvre.

[2] Barraud suffered periods of illness throughout his life and died of tuberculosis in Geneva, in 1934, at the age of 34.

His works are also held in the Musée des beaux-arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the Coninx Museum in Zurich and the Foundation for Art, Culture and History in Winterthur.