(b Paris, 10 March 1777; d Paris, 2 Oct 1860). French painter and printmaker. His parents sent him to Baron Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s studio where he made rapid progress. In 1797 he won second place in the Prix de Rome with the Death of Cato (untraced) behind the joint winners, Pierre Bouillon (1776–1831), Pierre Guérin and Louis André Gabriel Bouchet ( fl 1797–1819). In 1798, seriously ill, he withdrew from the competition and left the studio. His parents put him into commerce where he lasted 18 months, painting on Sundays, until his kinsman, M. Crouzet, director of the military academy at St Cyr, gave him a post as drawing-master to the students. He made his Salon début in 1802 with Narcissus (Arras, Mus. B.-A.). He sent Achilles Receiving Briseis (untraced) to the Salon of 1804 and then extended his range with the Aerial Tomb and Atala in the Arms of Chactas (1806; untraced), derived like Anne-Louis Girodet’s famous version (but two years before Girodet) from Chateaubriand’s story Atala (1801). Atala won Hersent a gold medal in the Salon of 1806. To an academic figure painter like Hersent, American Indians were as good a subject as ancient Greeks and had the advantage of being more interesting. Many of his mature pictures were painted with an academic sense of light and shade and composition, but using modern heroes in place of Greeks and Romans, and sentiment and anecdote in place of history. This mixed genre, neither history nor daily life, was popular with the new aristocracy of the First Empire. The Empress Josephine bought Fénelon Returning a Cow to a Family of Peasants (exh. 1810; Malmaison, Château N.), and the government commissioned him to paint the Crossing of the Bridge of Landshut (Versailles, Château) at the request of the Prince d’Eckmuth. Hersent returned to the Indian theme in 1814 with Las Casas Rent by Savages (untraced).

• Hersent, Louis
  • patrons and collectors
    • France, §III, 5(i): Painting & graphic arts, c 1814–c 1914: The search for a subject-matter
    • Orléans, House of: (11) Antoine-Marie-Philippe-Louis d’Orléans, Duc de Montpensier
  • pupils
    • Brascassat, Jacques-Raymond
    • Chenavard, Paul
    • Fauveau, Félicie de
    • Gleyre, Charles
    • Lepoittevin, Eugène
    • Schwiter, Louis-Auguste
    • Triqueti, Henri-Joseph-François
  • reproductive prints by others
    • Aubry-Lecomte, Hyacinthe
  • teachers
    • Regnault, Jean-Baptiste
  • works
    • Lisbon, §1(iii): History, urban development and art life, c 1800 and after