1. Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger was a French figurative painter and academic artist and teacher known for his Classical and Orientalist subjects.
33 Facts About Gustave Boulanger
1. 2.
Gustave Boulanger never knew his father, and when his mother's death left him orphaned at the age of fourteen, he became the ward of his uncle, Constant Desbrosses, who in 1840 sent him to study first under the history painter Pierre-Jules Jollivet and then at the atelier of Paul Delaroche, where Boulanger met and befriended his fellow student Jean-Leon Gerome.
3.
In 1845, Gustave Boulanger was sent by his uncle to Algeria to tend to Desbrosses's business interests there.
4.
Gustave Boulanger was fascinated by all he saw, and what was planned as a two-month stay turned to eight, until Desbrosses threatened to cut off his funds.
5.
Gustave Boulanger brought back a large number of sketches which he used for his first Orientalist paintings.
6.
Gustave Boulanger turned his efforts to winning the Prix de Rome, and with it, a scholarship to the Academie de France a Rome.
7.
In 1856, when his studies at Rome were complete, Gustave Boulanger took a second trip to North Africa, and then returned to Paris.
8.
Gustave Boulanger moved into his own atelier at rue de La Rochefoucauld, 64, but continued to meet and socialize with the other Neo-Grecs.
9.
Gustave Boulanger became one of Jean-Leon Gerome's closest friends; after 1863, Gerome regularly entrusted him with the management of his studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts during his travels in the East.
10.
Gustave Boulanger was privileged to immortalize the occasion with a work presented at the Salon of 1861, Repetition du "Joueur de flute" et de la "Femme de Diomede" chez le prince Napoleon.
11.
Gustave Boulanger would continue to evoke the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans throughout his career.
12.
Gustave Boulanger brought back the brilliance of the Orient in his eye rather than in his thought.
13.
Gustave Boulanger produced one of his most famous paintings near the end of his life, shown at the Paris Salon of 1886: Un Maquignon d'esclaves a Rome, which has become better known as The Slave Market.
14.
Gustave Boulanger was an influential teacher with a long list of students.
15.
When Gustave Boulanger was inducted as a member of the Institut de France in 1882, he joined the faculty of the Beaux-Arts de Paris and in his final years was both a teacher and an ardent champion of Academic art and its traditions and methods.
16.
The first was Notice sur M Lehmann in 1883, an encomium to the recently deceased Henri Lehmann, whom Boulanger saw as an exemplar of the best artistic virtues.
17.
The second speech was A nos eleves delivered in 1885, in which Gustave Boulanger attacked what he saw as a decadent, vain striving for novelty in the arts.
18.
Gustave Boulanger can write letters, heap volume upon volume, and deliver all the speeches he likes.
19.
Gustave Boulanger was sometimes wrong; he did not want to go with his century and lend himself to the changes that French art had to undergo, but he resisted in good faith and fought with conviction.
20.
Gustave Boulanger shared a long and fruitful relationship, both personal and professional, with the architect Charles Garnier.
21.
Gustave Boulanger obtained his Grand Prix de Rome for art the next year at age twenty-five, and the two met as students enjoying their subsequent scholarships at the French Academy at Rome.
22.
Gustave Boulanger would execute several more portraits of Garnier over the decades.
23.
In 1868, Gustave Boulanger spent the month of May traveling in Spain with Garnier and his wife, Louise Bary Garnier.
24.
Gustave Boulanger was the close friend of one of the most famous actresses in France, Zaire-Nathalie Martel, known to one and all as Mademoiselle Nathalie.
25.
Gustave Boulanger remains a legend in the annals of the Comedie-Francaise, not least for her quarrel with the much younger Sarah Bernhardt.
26.
Furthermore, the actress's death announcement in 1885 does not mention the name of Gustave Boulanger, which seems surprising.
27.
Gustave Boulanger donated his portrait of her, painted in 1867, to the Comedie-Francaise.
28.
Gustave Boulanger must have had a presentiment of his death, because, on the very day he was to fall ill, he insisted on reproducing, in a vehement study, the portrait of a three-year-old child whose photograph had been before him for several months, a project he had been setting aside.
29.
Gustave Boulanger was given "a beautiful funeral" attended by "le tout Paris artistique et litteraire," with speeches by his friends Henri Chapu, Tony Robert-Fleury, and Charles Garnier.
30.
The man is deeply and very legitimately missed; the painter will not be, not because M Boulanger painted mainly Greek or Roman subjects, but because he massacred them constantly by painting them without any trace of originality, without the slightest style, with the most despairing vulgarity, a ruthlessly convinced harshness and the most routine monotony.
31.
Gustave Boulanger has not always followed the same route; his very independent originality led him sometimes to right, sometimes to left; influences from Rome and the Academic milieu effected deviations here and there; but there is always a visible kinship between those two talents.
32.
Forever compared to Gerome, Gustave Boulanger seems fated to dwell in his shadow.
33.
In 1848, as a student, Gustave Boulanger submitted a painting for the Prix de Rome; the entry did not win, and the painting, Saint Pierre introduit dans la maison de Marie, mere de Jean, called Saint Pierre chez Marie, was believed lost for 171 years until it was rediscovered in the attic of an old house in a small hamlet in Creuse, France.