The Painters Archives - Page 5 sur 9

Ferdinand Heilbuth-E

Hamburg, June 27th 1826 – November 19th 1889, Paris

Ferdinand Heilbuth, a French painter of German origin, was born in Hamburg where he first studied theology to become a rabbi. He abandoned his studies to travel with Charles Gleyre (1806-1874) to Düsseldorf, Rome and finally Paris where he decided to settle. During the war of 1870, he took refuge in London.
Charles Gleyre, a Swiss painter and professor of Fine Arts, opened his own studio which was frequented by Claude Monet (1840-1926), Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870), Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) and many others. Heilbuth’s training was undoubtedly not only under the guidance of the master, but also through contact with these disciples, who were to become famous, thanks to these encounters, in particular those with Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) and Mary Cassatt (1843-1926).
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), in a correspondence with Anthon Van Rappard (1858-1892), expressed his admiration for this artist. From 1853, he exhibited portraits at the Paris Salon and received a second class medal in 1857 and a recall in 1859 and 1861. His painting « L’Absolution du péché véniel » was acquired by the Empress Eugenie on April 30, 1865 for 10 000 F. He was named Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1861 and Officer on July 13, 1881. He obtained French nationality in 1876.
While visiting Ecouen, Ferdinand Heilbuth was often welcomed by his friend Luigi Chialiva (1841-1914).

For further information, please read the book “L’Ecole d’Ecouen, une colonie de peintres au XIXe siècle” (bilingual French-English).

Thomas Couture-E

Version Française

Painters Listing

Senlis, December 21th 1815 – March 30th 1879, Villiers-le-Bel

When he was 11 years old, his family moved to Paris in 1826 where he studied at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1830, he entered the studio of Antoine Gros (1771-1835) where, not very sure of himself, he drew a portrait on the sly of his master, which drew this comment from him: « But my little friend, you draw like an old academician ». He is, in fact, one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. Then he attended the workshop of Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). He failed several times in the competition for the Prix de Rome but finally won the second prize in 1837.

From 1840, he exhibited at the Paris Salon where he was awarded a medal in 1847 for « Romans of the Decadence« . On November 11, he was named Knight of the Legion of Honor. Throughout his life, he trained artists such as Edmond Eugène Valton (1836-1910), Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) or Edouard Manet (1832-1883) who, from the very first day, said: « I don’t know why I’m here; when I get to the studio, it seems to me that I’m entering a tomb ».
His fame spread to the United States where he exhibited in different cities.
Thomas Couture likes dark tones. Almost all of his models posed in black, brown or gray suits, which gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his virtuosity. The « Portrait of the Baroness d’Astier de la Vigerie« , recently acquired by the Senlis Museum, is an example of this. On July 8, 1869, he acquired the castle of Villiers-le-Bel, a property of 3.4 hectares, for 137,500 francs from the seizure chamber of the civil court. It was from this time on that he regularly visited the painters of Ecouen.
In 1872, Thomas Couture was killed. He no longer attracted the crowds. The world as a whole, and that of painting in particular, had changed. « The battle against realism was lost, impressionism and symbolism were coming ». With a last attempt at a coup d’éclat with « Damocles« , Couture retired for good.
He died in Villiers-le-Bel in his home called the Château. He was buried in Père-Lachaise.

For further information, please read the book “L’Ecole d’Ecouen, une colonie de peintres au XIXe siècle” (bilingual French-English).

House of Thomas Couture in Villiers-le-bel

James Wells Champney-E

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Painters Listing

Boston, July 16th 1843 – May 1st 1903, New York

James Wells Champney first studied woodcarving at the age of 16, which he abandoned in 1862 when the Civil War broke out, to join the army. Discharged for malaria, he studied drawing from 1864 to 1866 at Dr. Dio Lewis’ seminary. In 1866, he decided to embark on an artistic career and left to study in Europe.
After a short stay in London, he arrived in Ecouen in 1867 where he spent several summers in the studio of Pierre Edouard Frère with whom he discovered a great affinity. After brief stays in Antwerp and Italy, he exhibited his first genre painting at the Paris Salon of 1869. In May 1873, he married Elizabeth Johnson Williams, a native of Ohio, and from then on they seemed to travel and work together. Their eldest son, Edouard Frère Champney, born on May 4, 1874 in Ecouen, was to be an architect and the choice of his first name shows the influence that the master had on his students and the complicity that united them.
The high point of his career was his exhibition in 1897 at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, where he presented a series of forty pastels entitled Types of American girlhood.
James Wells Campbel died accidentally when he fell down a broken elevator shaft and tried to get out on his own.
If Champney, for his friends, is Wells, he signs his works Champ.

For further information, please read the book “L’Ecole d’Ecouen, une colonie de peintres au XIXe siècle” (bilingual French-English).

Mary Cassatt-E

Version Française

Painters Listing

Allegheny (Pittsburgh, PA) USA, May 22nd 1844 – June 14th 1926, Le-Mesnil-Théribus (Oise)

Her real name is Mary Stevenson Cassatt. Daughter of an investment banker and a large American bourgeois family, she moved with her parents to Paris in 1851.
She traveled to Europe: Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, etc. before returning to Pennsylvania where she attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1861 to 1862, learning the rudiments of her art. Mary was disappointed. In 1865, she returned to Paris with her mother, where she found fellow students from Philadelphia: Edward Roberts, Thomas Easkins (1844-1916), including Eliza Haldeman (1843-1910) a fellow student.
They studied with the painter Paul Contant Soyer and then enrolled in the class of Charles Chaplin (1825-1891) where they learned the art of portraiture and obtained their copyist cards at the Louvre. Mary was also a student of the painter Jean Léon Gérome (1824-1904). They visited Barbizon. In 1862, with Eliza Haldeman, they left for Ecouen, where, at the foot of the Renaissance castle, an artistic community lived and worked; among them, Pierre Edouard Frère and Paul Constant Soyer shared their experience with younger artists. They stayed there for a year, very close to Soyer and his wife. Mary entered the Paris Salon in the spring of 1868, where her « Joueuse de mandoline » (Mandolin Player) was accepted; a somewhat melancholy figure that showed her under the influence of Jean Baptiste Corot (1796-1875). She then signed Mary Stevenson. She discovered the works of Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). She then discovered impressionism.
In 1904, the Legion of Honor is awarded to her. In 1910, she gave up engraving. Having become practically blind in 1914, Mary Cassatt gave up painting. Shortly before her death, she bequeathed her works to the City of Paris; she died in her castle of Beaufresne (France) which she had acquired in 1894.

Pour plus d’informations, nous vous invitons à lire le livre « L’Ecole d’Ecouen – une colonie de peintres au XIXe siècle »

Pauline Lise Léonide Bourges-E

English version

Liste des Peintres

Paris, January 22nd 1838 – December 1909, Paris

Destined to become a painter at a very early age, she made a first stay in Ecouen with her mother at the beginning of the 1860s and settled there permanently in 1866, first on rue Adeline and then at 29 rue d’Ezanville. There she painted her first picture « During the harvest« . She studied figure painting with Pierre Edouard Frère, painted her portrait and her first modest home. She fled in 1870 to take refuge in Honfleur and, in 1871, she decided to join Daubigny in Auvers-sur-Oise. Under the influence of Corot, she turned to landscape and plein air painting where she gained a certain notoriety. The gallery owner Gambart bought a large number of her works.

She participated in the Paris Salons from 1857 to 1901, was invited several times to Reims and exhibited in London in 1878.
In 1894, she published a collection of etchings called « Daubigny, souvenirs and sketches » showing the way of life of the artists in Auvers-sur-Oise. On some of the works, one can read the name of Pierre Edouard Frère, that of his son Charles Edouard Frere and that of Herman Alfred Leonard Wahlberg (1834-1906), a Swedish painter who lived for some time in Ecouen.
When Daubigny died, she sold her paintings to help with the subscription she had initiated for the erection of a monument to the memory of her friend, an initiative she had taken a few months earlier for Corot.
She rests in the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise.

Pour plus d’informations, nous vous invitons à lire le livre « L’Ecole d’Ecouen – une colonie de peintres au XIXe siècle »

John George Todd-E

Canterbury, UK, March 31st 1832 – 1898, Ipswich

When he arrived in France from his native England, John George Todd (who would sign George Todd) was welcomed and hosted in Écouen by Luigi Chialiva, the generous host. This will be his adopted city. Forgetting the city where he was born, the son of George and Caroline Victorine Boulas founded a family there, and, after being widowed of Juliette Caroline Charpentier, who died on February 21, 1870, married on June 19, 1880 Céline Augustine Françoise Régnier, in Ecouen. Luigi Chialiva is of course his witness. He had previously recognized a son Georges Amédée, born on May 30, 1875. In 1875, he had already become a landlord, in the rue de la Beauvette, next to the property of like several other painters, and his house was described as one of the most artistic in the village: a gate, a big bell, a fierce dog, flowers…and a sophisticated interior decoration, with a host of harmoniously arranged objects, which Cornelia Conant and Mary Stone, in 1881, described to us in their account of their visit to Ecouen: « many treasures such as antique tapestries and fantastic furniture, bronze pieces and china » were destroyed during the 1870 war by the Prussians. He was so well integrated that the two Americans thought at first that he was a native! They saw in his studio a rural scene with two people, a girl and a boy, looking away to a town lit by the last rays of the sun.
In Écouen, in a greenhouse, he cultivated most of the flowers that we find on his paintings, and which Émile Zola warmly recommended in his Salon of 1866, proof of his fame. He became one of the great still life specialists. The Royal Academy opened its doors to him in 1888 as well as other London galleries.
In 1879 he also painted a theater curtain for the Rosendaël casino in Dunkirk.
The « Petit Journal » of February 23, 1870 presents a letter from the journalist L. Raymond who asks his director to evoke the event of which he was the witness: « The artistic colony of Ecouen, so numerous and so interesting by the talented men who compose it, has just been saddened by the death of Mrs. Todd, the wife of the painter of the flowers, whose paintings were noticed at the last exhibitions of the Palace of the Champs-Elysées. Mrs. Todd was only twenty-four years old; for a long time she had been suffering from an unforgiving illness. All the artists of Ecouen were anxious to give their comrade and friend a proof of sympathy: they followed the convoy of Mrs. Todd with tears in their eyes. I noticed Messrs Couture, Schenck, Soyer, Otto Weber, Frère père et fils, Duverger, Aufray, Dansaert, Hugot, Seignac. Mr. Constant Guéroult, your collaborator and friend, who spends the summer in Écouen, came from Paris to attend this sad ceremony. »
On the one hand, it seems that there were particular links between our painters and the newspaper, since several paintings, as we have seen, represent readers browsing this flagship of the press of the time. On the other hand, we can notice the great solidarity of the men of this Colonie des peintres d’Ecouen.
It should also be noted that he is often confused with a homonymous English painter of the same period: Henry George Todd, who was also famous for his still lifes.

For further information, please read the book “L’Ecole d’Ecouen, une colonie de peintres au XIXe siècle” (bilingual French-English).