(b Paris, 6 April 1804; d Montmorency, nr Paris, 4 Oct 1892). French painter. He was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1820 on the recommendation of Merry-Joseph Blondel and entered the studio of Antoine-Jean Gros in 1821. In 1830 he won the Prix de Rome for his Meleager Taking up Arms Once More at the Insistence of his Wife (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). As a pensionnaire at the Villa Medici in Rome from 1831 to 1835 he demonstrated a capacity for absorbing new sources into his art. He gained particularly (as did Friedrich Overbeck) from his discovery of the Italian ‘Primitives’, including Giotto, Fra Angelico and Perugino among others, during a period spent in Florence and Assisi in 1833 and soon became one of the most interesting religious painters of his generation.