Paul Delaroche
Place Born
ParisPlace Died
ParisBio
From his first great success at the 1824 Salon with Joan of Arc in Prison to the 1857 retrospective exhibition at the école des Beaux-Arts following his death Paul Delaroche was one of the most popular and respected French painters of the nineteenth century. He was trained first by the landscape painter L.-E. Watelet and then by Baron Gros, who influenced his development as a history painter and later called Delaroche “the glory of my school.” [1] Delaroche’s historically accurate and technically skilled style of history painting seemed to some a stylistically neutral compromise in the raging battle between classicism (exemplified by Ingres) and Romanticism (exemplified by Delacroix) and for that he has been named the leader of the “juste milieu.” [2]
Delaroche treated history from a wide range of periods, but he became particularly associated with British history, following his sensational picture of The Death of Queen Elizabeth of 1828. Delaroche was included in the most important decorative program of the Restoration, the decoration of the Louvre’s Musée Charles X, for which he painted the sixteenth-century French history subject, The Death of Duranti. During the July Monarchy Delaroche continued to receive official commissions; a major work was his Hemicyle mural depicting the history of art for the école des Beaux-Arts, commissioned in 1837. In 1832, at the age of 35, Delaroche was the youngest artist of the nineteenth century to be elected to the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts, a sign that the official hegemony of classicism was waning.