Eugène-Marie-François Deveria

Bio

The Devéria brothers, Achille and Eugène, were very well known in Paris of the 1820s and ‘30s, not only for their work as artists but also for their involvement in progressive Romantic circles. Achille, who worked most memorably in the medium of lithography, specialized in genre subjects and portraiture, while Eugène was the more serious history painter. He was a student of Girodet and made a sensational Salon debut in 1827 with his Birth of Henri IV, which, as far as his critics were concerned, he was never able to live up to. This painting, though dating from much later in his career, recalls Devéria’s earlier romantic style which elicited comparisons to Veronese because of the artist’s rich palette and painterly style.

Subjects from British history, particularly as told in the plays of William Shakespeare, held a fascination for many of the Romantic writers with whom Devéria was acquainted, so it is logical that he should have tapped this resource for pictorial subject matter. Achille had depicted Shakespeare productions in Paris, in 1827, and, in 1835, did a series of lithographs illustrating The VI Wives of Henry VIII. Devéria’s renewed interest in British historical subject matter may have been the result of voyages to England and Scotland in the 1850s.