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Friends and family
At various times Maurice Sand, Scheffer, Charles Gounod, Hector Berlioz were in relationships with Pauline Viardot—in letters they claimed that they were in love with her. She wrote in one letter:
Louis and Scheffer (Scheffer was the best friend of Louis Viardot, husband of Pauline Viardot) has always been my dearest of friends, and it is sad, that I was never able to respond to the hot and deep love of Louis, despite all my volition. She was married to Louis Viardot at 18 years old, when her husband was a director of an Italian opera house in Paris and a friend of Scheffer. Scheffer was a confidant of Pauline Viardot and a friend of her family until his death.
In 1850 Scheffer became a French citizen and married Sophie Marin, the widow of General Marie Étienne François Henri Baudrand. Marin died in 1856.
His younger brother Hendrik Scheffer, born in The Hague on 27 September 1798, was also a painter.
Gallery
See also
Musée de la Vie Romantique, Hôtel Scheffer-Renan, Paris
References
Further reading
Morris, Edward (1985). "Ary Scheffer and his English Circle". Oud Holland. 99 (4): 294–323. doi:10.1163/187501785X00143. JSTOR 42711190.
External links
Media related to Ary Scheffer at Wikimedia Commons
Ary Scheffer at Art Renewal Center
Auguste-Xavier Leprince (August 28, 1799 – December 26, 1826) was a French artist and painter who attained celebrity at the age of seventeen. His patrons included the Duchesse de Berry, Charles X, and Alexandre du Sommerard. He was also a teacher; in his twenties he established his own atelier in Paris, with pupils including his two younger brothers, Robert-Léopold and Pierre-Gustave, as well as Eugène Lepoittevin and Nicolas Alexandre Barbier. His meteoric career came to an abrupt end and his "brilliant promise was cut short by his premature death at the age of twenty-seven."
Early success with pastoral subjects
Xavier Leprince was born in Paris, the son of Anne-Pierre Leprince (said to be a painter and lithographer, but about whom little is known) and Marie-Adélaïde-Florentine Datir. Alexandre du Sommerard, who became one of his patrons, indicates that Xavier was essentially a self-taught artist, saying his early paintings were created "almost without any other guide than nature."
His earliest known works, dating from 1816 to 1819, mostly depict livestock and their keepers in pastoral settings. These precocious works gained for the teenaged Leprince "a celebrity confirmed by the exorbitant prices set, by the merchants themselves, for his first productions." Art historians see in these early works the influence of 17th-century Dutch landscape and animal painters Adriaen van de Velde, Adriaen van Ostade and Isaac van Ostade, and the French landscape artist Jean-Louis de Marne.
He made his salon debut at age nineteen, exhibiting six paintings, all landscapes or rural subjects, at the Paris Salon of 1819, where he was awarded a medal.
His expertise at depicting farming life in rural France reached a new level with his 1822 work La moisson, a painting of laborers harvesting a field, which was purchased by Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, duchesse de Berry, who also collected Leprince's 1823 painting of ice-skaters, Les Patineurs. (She may also have commissioned from Leprince a painting depicting guests listening to music in her grove at the Hermitage of Enghien at Montmorency, known from a lithograph.)
His 1823 painting, Embarquement des bestiaux sur le Passager dans le port de Honfleur (Embarkation of Cattle on the Passager at the Port of Honfleur), emblematic of the cattle paintings of the era, was of singular importance to his career. Féréol Bonnemaison wrote that it "placed M. Leprince among our best genre painters. His career is now gloriously open before him." The painting was purchased by Charles X for 3,000 francs, and is now in the Louvre.
Other genres
Moving beyond pastoral subjects, Leprince also painted marine art, scenes of Parisian life, works in the troubadour style, portraits, and the Forest of Fontainebleau, which had just begun to attract a new generation of French artists.
He also specialized in painting the human figures for a number of landscape painters, including Nicolas Alexandre Barbier, Étienne Bouhot, Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy, André Giroux, Charles-Caïus Renoux, and Henri Édouard Truchot. This practice of being a "general contractor" to artists "who do not have the courage to study the figures of men or animals to adorn their works" was criticized by one writer, who argued that it would surely "detach many jewels from his crown in public esteem." The critic nonetheless praised Leprince's "wit, verve, originality, finesse, and great facility in composition and execution."
Leprince's skill at figure painting was appreciated by Corot, and Vincent Pomarède speculates that Corot was influenced by Leprince.
Works such as the watercolor A Ceremony on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, dated 1821, provide evidence of travel to Italy.
In 1822, from the Société des Amis des Arts, Leprince received a commission to commemorate the valiant efforts of French doctors and nuns who had traveled to Barcelona in response to an epidemic of yellow fever, which killed an estimated 20,000 inhabitants. The resulting painting was an ambitious panorama with more than forty figures, variously called Peste de Barcelone or Les Médecins français et les Sœurs de Saint-Camille à Barcelone. La Nouveauté called it a "very remarkable" work "which announced a very distinguished talent." The painting was praised and minutely described by Charles Paul Landon in a volume of his Annales du Musée et de l'École moderne des beaux-arts, which included a fold-out reproduction, currently the only known image of Leprince's painting.
In 1824, inspired to paint the coast of Normandy, Leprince began sharing a studio with Eugène Isabey at Honfleur.
Patronage of du Sommerard
By 1822, the year Leprince turned 23, his talents as a painter had attracted the patronage of the antiquarian Alexandre du Sommerard, whose collection of medieval art and artifacts would become the Musée de Cluny. Du Sommerard included lithographs of four works by Leprince in his highly influential Vues de Provins, which also included four works by Xavier's younger brother, Léopold Leprince. The book, an illustrated tour of medieval churches and abbeys, many of them reduced to ruins in the violence of the French Revolution, was part of an artistic and literary movement, the troubadour style, that romanticized the Middle Ages in France. About Leprince's Vue de la partie des fortifications dite le Trou du Chat, the art historian Pierre Bénard writes, "Is there not something Virgilian in the peaceful herd immortalized by Xavier Leprince at the foot of a tower of the ramparts?"
At the Paris Salon of 1824, Leprince exhibited a full-length portrait of his patron, listed in the catalogue as Portrait en pied de M. du S… dans son cabinet. Its location is unknown.
At the time of his death, Leprince left unfinished two paintings commissioned by du Sommerard. One was The Artist's Studio. The other depicted an elderly collector conferring with a Jewish antiques dealer and surrounded by prized artifacts from his collection, entitled L’Antiquaire (The Antiquarian). To complete this painting, du Sommerard commissioned another of his protégés, Charles-Caïus Renoux, who did so "with rare talent." It was displayed in the Paris Salon of 1827. A contemporary reviewer noted that "at the time of Xavier Leprince's death, the two figures alone were made, and the rest was hardly sketched out. It is M. Renoux who was commissioned to complete this interior," consisting of furniture, armor, and numerous objets d'art from the Middle Ages; "finally everything comes together to make this painting a precious piece." The contemporary critic Auguste Jal declared the painting "a perfect work." L’Antiquaire has been cited by modern scholars researching the history of antiquarianism and the invention of the modern museum.
The Artist's Studio and artists en plein air
At an unusually early age, especially if he was in fact a self-taught painter, Leprince opened an atelier and accepted pupils. In the last year of his life he began work on a highly-detailed painting depicting himself and his circle of artists, students, and patrons, following in the tradition of atelier paintings such as Louis-Léopold Boilly's Gathering of Artists in the Studio of Isabey (1798).The highly detailed canvas shows how artists worked, what tools were used, and how brushes were held. Plaster casts of well-known classical sculptures, including the Laocöon and the Venus de Milo, are displayed around the room. Two classical busts, perched high on a shelf at right, appear to look down like spectators on the informal assembly of students, patrons, and critics. Leprince is the figure seen from the back in profile seated before the large painting to the right of center. The canvas he is working on is Loading of Livestock at Honfleur, which he exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1824 and was purchased two years later by King Charles X of France. The inscription on the stretcher notes that this painting was commissioned by M. du Sommerard, Leprince's chief patron. In 1869 it was purchased by Octave de Labastie, the figure seated before an easel, fifth from the left.
Leprince's painting includes no fewer than seven easels and nine painters with spectators. The focus is not on a single artist, in other words, but on several different ones. The studio was in a property called “la Childebert”, after its address at 9, rue Childebert (Paris), close to what is now the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. Here Auguste-Xavier Leprince shared a studio with his brothers, Robert-Léopold (1800–1847) and Gustave Leprince (1810–1837)…Preliminary studies are preserved in the Musée Magnin in Dijon, including for the group of figures to the left and for another in the background…A distinguishing feature of both the studies and the finished painting is the individual character of the people represented, showing that they were intended to be identifiable. They presumably included not just some of the main artists of the neighbourhood, but also no doubt prominent officials and collectors…The ambitious studio interior with some thirty figures which Leprince painted the year he died was a commemorative portrait of the three brothers and their immediate circle designed to impress, but also with an element of humour.
The painting was unfinished at the time of Leprince's death. To finish it, Du Sommerard commissioned one of Leprince's pupils, Eugène Lepoittevin. When it was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1827, the catalogue noted: "Of the thirty figure-portraits included in the composition, nineteen had been completed by Mr. Xavier Leprince before his premature death; the eleven others and various details are by the hand of Mr. Eugène Potdevin [sic]." The second figure from left, seated at an easel, is thought to be a portrait of Lepoittevin, either by his own hand or by that of Leprince. Another artist known to appear in the painting is Augustin Enfantin (1793-1827), but the figure depicting him has not been identified. Du Sommerard presumably appears, but his image has not been identified.
In 1982, The Artist's Studio was acquired by the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Two oil on canvas works which appear to be studies for the painting are in the collection of the Musée Magnin in Dijon. Intérieur d'atelier depicts the figure thought to be Leprince in the finished painting, seated before a blank canvas; Le Peintre dans son atelier depicts the seated figure thought to portray Eugène Lepoittevin.
In the years leading up to The Artist's Studio, Leprince made numerous studies of artists, notably Studio Interior with Artists Working (1820), now in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, and many drawings of artists in sketchbooks held by the Louvre.
Leprince also depicted artists en plein air (outdoors), notably in Halte des peintres à Fontainebleau (Painters at Rest, Fontainebleau; c. 1824), which was included in the 2008 exhibition "In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet" at the National Gallery. "It is quite common for artists to represent themselves at work. But the originality of Leprince's work is to show them discovering the splendor of the landscape of Fontainebleau. Leprince places the painters in the center of the foreground of the composition and draws them very small. They are thus the scale marker of this landscape which becomes, through this artifice, monumental in the eyes of the spectator."
Illustrations and lithographs
For popular consumption, Leprince also created book illustrations and works for reproduction as lithographs. In the estate sale that followed his death, one lot was described as "fifty lithographed pieces, comprising the complete work of everything M. X. Leprince has executed in lithography."
Not too far from boyhood himself, he provided illustrations for Les Jeux des jeunes garçons (The Games of Young Boys), published in 1822. The book was a popular success (the entry at worldcat.org notes a fifth edition), and was followed a year later by the fanciful Jeux des jeunes filles de tous les pays (Games of Young Girls of All Countries).