26 Facts About Antoine Chintreuil

Antoine Chintreuil was a French landscape painter.

Antoine Chintreuil was among the starving artists who lived la vie de boheme in Paris in the 1840s, as popularized by his friend and fellow Bohemian, the novelist Henri Murger.

Antoine Chintreuil has been called the "great-grandfather of the Impressionists," but Chintreuil himself was never part of a movement, and his paintings, especially the major works from the last decade of his life, remain difficult for critics and art historians to classify.

Antoine Chintreuil's mother, born Suzanne Clapet, ran a boarding school for girls.

Antoine Chintreuil loved to draw, and his father arranged for him to take drawing lessons from a family friend named Buisson.

Antoine Chintreuil's mother died at age 40, on April 29,1832, and the boarding school closed.

The 18-year-old Antoine Chintreuil became the only support of his infirm father.

Antoine Chintreuil used the money to set up a fund for his father's care, and, keeping only two or three hundred francs for himself, he moved to Paris to seek his fortune.

Boitard put him to work hand-coloring engravings of plants and insects, but Antoine Chintreuil had no aptitude for coloring inside the lines, and Boitard declared that the young man would never become an artist.

Antoine Chintreuil then found employment at a bookshop, where he became friends with a fellow employee, Jules Francois Felix Fleury-Husson, who was later to become famous writing under the byline Champfleury.

Antoine Chintreuil befriended two brothers, Joseph Desbrosses and Leopold Desbrosses, who shared his dream of becoming an artist.

Antoine Chintreuil gained inspiration but lost his job at the bookstore for being absent without leave.

Antoine Chintreuil was more determined than ever to become a painter, even as his fortunes reached their lowest ebb.

However, when Antoine Chintreuil started sulking and muttering that they were trying to bar his way to success, the President relented, the Treasurer was authorized to pay out the sum requested, and all was well again.

In 1842, Antoine Chintreuil managed to take formal studies in the atelier of Paul Delaroche, and around 1843 he befriended Corot.

In 1843, at the Galeries des Beaux-Arts, Antoine Chintreuil sold four works for a total of 220 francs; most were genre paintings.

In 1845, Antoine Chintreuil found a patron in the famous poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean de Beranger, who not only bought paintings from the younger man and paid for his art supplies, but wrote many letters of recommendation to collectors and connoisseurs.

In 1849, in his mid-thirties, Antoine Chintreuil entered into the most important relationship of his life, with the much younger Jean-Alfred Desbrosses.

The idyllic period at Igny was cut short in 1855 when Antoine Chintreuil became seriously ill with what was to become a chronic pulmonary ailment for the rest of his life.

Antoine Chintreuil's career continued on a steady course, with more paintings purchased by the French State and by collectors including Alexandre Dumas fils, but in 1863 his entries were all rejected by the jury of the Paris Salon.

Antoine Chintreuil was a marine painter, producing coastal scenes and seascapes during stays in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Fecamp and Dieppe.

Antoine Chintreuil feared, with each coughing attack, each lapse, that his patient would pass away in his arms.

Antoine Chintreuil was placed in full sunlight at the threshold of the glass door of the great room, on a mattress and cushions prepared in the garden to receive him, and he was finally able to run his dull eyes over the places he loved so much, and where he had spent his sweetest hours.

Desbrosses worked to have a monument to Antoine Chintreuil erected in his hometown of Pont-de-Vaux; the inauguration of Antoine Chintreuil's bust in the Place des Cordeliers took place on May 5,1879.

Desbrosses, having struggled alongside Antoine Chintreuil to create "from scratch a new, personal, original poetics," had his own successful career as an artist; this was seen by Henriet as another of Antoine Chintreuil's legacies.

Antoine Chintreuil was exploring this vision in the 1860s and early 1870s, seeking to take landscape painting in a very different direction from the "realist" and "naturalist" tendencies that were dominant in those years, and to use it as a vehicle for heightened poetic expression.