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Gendron, (Etienne-)Auguste [Augustin]
(b Paris, 17 March 1817; d Paris, 15 July 1881). French painter. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris on 20 October 1827 as a pupil of Paul Delaroche. The title of the picture which he sent to his first Salon in 1840, Captivity in Babylon (untraced), recalls the subject of Eduard Bendemann’s famous picture of 1832, Jews in Exile (Düsseldorf, Kstsamml. Nordrhein–Westfalen). Gendron went to Italy in 1844 at the same time as Delaroche and Jean-Léon Gérôme. From there he sent A Public Commentary on Dante (untraced) to the Salon of 1844 and Willis (Le Havre, Mus. B.-A.), a vaporous group of spirits, inspired by German literature and also, perhaps, by German art, to the Salon of 1846. The Willis made his reputation. Théophile Gautier was predictably impressed, and in his review of the Salon of 1846 he ‘discovered’ Gendron as well as most of the painters in Gendron’s circle, pupils of Delaroche, who banded together in the late 1840s to form the NÉO-GREC group. It was, perhaps, in the company of Gautier, Gérôme and the Néo-Grecs, rather than in Italy, that Gendron became interested in the ancient world. His debt to Gérôme is particularly evident in Tiberius at Capri (exh. Salon, 1852; Marseille, Mus. B.-A.), where the twisting concubines, as Gendron admitted, were copied from Gérôme’s Greek Interior (1849; untraced). But the ancient world was never more to him than an excuse to paint variations on the theme of the langorous sylphs who decorate The Voice of the Torrent (1857; Le Havre, Mus. B.-A.), Nymphs at the Tomb of Adonis (exh. Salon, 1864; Toulouse, Mus. Augustins) and Foolish Virgins (exh. Salon. 1873; Angers, Mus. B.-A.).
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