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Lepoittevin [Poidevin], Eugène(-Modeste-Edmond)
(b Paris, 31 July 1806; d Paris, 6 Aug 1870). French painter and lithographer. A student of Louis Hersent and Auguste-Xavier Leprince, he was a prolific painter and lithographer and exhibited regularly in the Salons in Paris from 1831. He combined history, genre and landscape in his marine and pastoral narratives. The influence of Dutch painting is not only evident in his scale, topographical accuracy and attention to light and air but also in his choice of Dutch subjects, as in such works as Van de Velde Painting the Effect of a Broadside Fired from the Ship of Admiral de Ruyter (1846; see Art-Union, viii (1846), p. 100), the Studio of Paul Potter (1847; see Art-Union, ix (1847), p. 20) and the Studio of van de Velde (1854; see A. J. [London], vi (1854), p. 184). In these the Dutch painters are ironically depicted working in nature, not in their studios. Lepoittevin’s primary figures are often at the apex of a pyramid composed of healthy women and children, faithful domestic animals and other elements in spacious, horizontal formats. While some paintings (e.g. Shipwrecked, 1839; Frankish Women, c. 1842; both Amiens, Mus. Picardie) suggest the violence of the Romantic Sublime, others, such as the Fisherman’s Return (1848; see Art-Union, x (1848), p. 84), are more sentimental. Beraldi divided Lepoittevin’s graphic work into categories entitled marines, patriotic souvenirs and, apparently his most popular, Albums de diableries. Lepoittevin travelled and sketched in England, the Netherlands, France and Italy; his work attracted a pan-European bourgeois audience interested in well-composed and carefully costumed romances on a human scale, borrowed from wide-ranging sources in history, art history and literature yet rooted in observed nature.
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