1797-1856
French
Paul Delaroche Locations
Painter and sculptor, son of Gregoire-Hippolyte Delaroche. Though he was offered a post in the Bibliotheque Nationale by his uncle, Adrien-Jacques Joly, he was determined to become an artist. As his brother Jules-Hippolyte was then studying history painting with David, his father decided that Paul should take up landscape painting, and in 1816 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to study under Louis-Etienne Watelet (1780-1866). Having competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome for landscape painting, he left Watelet studio in 1817 and worked for a time with Constant-Joseph Desbordes (1761-1827). In 1818 he entered the studio of Antoine-Jean Gros, where his fellow pupils included Richard Parkes Bonington, Eugene Lami and Camille Roqueplan. Related Paintings of Paul Delaroche :. | Henrietta Sontag | Herodias | Herodias | The execution of Lady Jane Grey | Madame Georges Bizet | Related Artists:
JacomettoItalian Early Renaissance Painter, active 1472-1497
Baron Antoine-Jean Gros1771-1835
French
Baron Antoine-Jean Gros Galleries
The son of a painter, Antoine Jean Gros was born in Paris on March 16, 1771. At the age of 14 he entered the studio of Jacques Louis David, the acknowledged leader of the classical revival. Although his own work became radically different from David's, he maintained a lifelong respect for his teacher and envisioned himself as the upholder of the Davidian tradition.
In 1787 Gros entered the Acad??mie de Peinture, and when the Acad??mie dissolved in 1793 (a result of the French Revolution) he went to Italy. He met Josephine Bonaparte in Genoa in 1796, and she introduced him to Napoleonic society. Gros entered Napoleon's immediate entourage and accompanied him on several north Italian campaigns. Gros also became involved with Napoleon's program of confiscating Italian art for removal to France.
Gros returned to Paris in 1800 and began to show his Napoleonic paintings in the annual Salons. The most famous of these are the Pesthouse at Jaffa (1804) and Napoleon at Eylau (1808). These works served to deify Napoleon, showing him engaged in acts of heroism and mercy. Stylistically, the paintings were revolutionary:their exotic settings, rich color, agitated space, and general penchant for showing the gruesome specifics of war and suffering differed radically from the cool generalizations of Davidian classicism that Gros had learned as a student. The presentation of contemporary historical events was also new, a harbinger of the realism that developed steadily during the first half of the 19th century in French, American, and English painting. Finally, the emphatic emotionalism of Gros's art established the foundation of romantic painting that Th??odore G??ricault and Eug??ne Delacroix developed after him.
Unlike that of some of his countrymen (David is a case in point), Gros's position did not suffer after the fall of Napoleon. Gros painted for the restored monarchy, for instance, Louis XVIII Leaving the Tuileries (1817), and he decorated the dome of the Panth??on in Paris with scenes of French history (1814-1824). For this Charles X made him a baron in 1824. But these works lack the zest and commitment of Gros's Napoleonic period, perhaps because they were not based on the immediate kinds of historical experiences that had inspired the earlier paintings.
Although marked by considerable public success, Gros's later career was in many ways acutely troubled. Basically, he could not resolve his personal esthetic theories with his own painting or with the work of his younger contemporaries. To the end Gros wished to propagate the classicism of David, and he took over David's studio when the master was exiled in 1816. By the 1820s, however, the revolutionary romanticism of G??ricault and Delacroix, among others, had clearly begun to eclipse classicism, and Gros found himself fighting a lonely and losing battle for conservatism. Ironically, he was fighting a trend that his own best work had helped to originate. As he persisted, moreover, his own painting began to show a diffident mixture of classic and romantic attitudes. Thus, while he was inherently a romantic, he tragically came to doubt himself. Gros died on June 26, 1835, apparently a suicide.
DELEN, Dirck vanDutch painter (1604/5-1671)
Dutch painter. When he married in 1625 he was a citizen of Middelburg, but he settled in nearby Arnemuiden, where he became master of the toll-house. From 1628 until his death he was almost continually a member of the town council, mostly as burgomaster. He was widowed three times and had at least one son, though no children survived him.