|
Lecomte du Nouÿ, (Jules-)Jean(-Antoine)
(b Paris, 10 June 1842; d Paris, 19 Feb 1929). French painter and sculptor. He was born into a noble family of Piedmontese origin. He studied (1861–3) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Charles Gleyre and Emile Signol. The major influence on his development, however, was Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose pupil he became in 1864. He was deeply affected by the polished realism of Gérôme’s Néo-grec style. Death of Jocasta (1865; Arras, Mus. B.-A.) shows Lecomte du Nouÿ’s taste for carefully detailed scenes, the subjects of which were drawn from antique sources. From 1863 he exhibited historical genre, religious paintings and portraits (e.g. Adolphe Crémieux, 1878; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay) at the annual Salons, but he did not receive official recognition until 1869, when Bearers of Bad News (Tunis, Min. Affaires Cult.) was acquired by the State. In 1872 he first visited Greece, Egypt, and Turkey, and on this and subsequent trips he executed sketches that would serve as the bases for his paintings. He was attracted to themes of eroticism, violence and oriental despotism and throughout his career successfully exhibited paintings of this sort at the Salon, such as the Guard of the Seraglio: Souvenir of Cairo (1876; Paris, priv. col., see 1984 exh. cat., no. 86) and the White Slave (1888; Nantes, Mus. B.-A.). He was also commissioned to provide paintings for various churches in Paris, including St Nicolas (1879) and the chapel of St Vincent-de-Paul (1879) in La Trinité, and later painted decorative cycles for such churches in Romania as Trei Ierarhi in Iasi. In 1895 his first sculpture was exhibited at the Salon, and in 1901 he received an honorary mention for the sculpture Death of Gavroche (untraced). He also sculpted in Romania, producing such works as the bronze statue of Prince Barbo Stirvey in Craiova. His brother André Lecomte du Nouÿ (1844–1914) was an architect.
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
