17 Facts About Merry-Joseph Blondel

Merry-Joseph Blondel was a French history painter of the Neoclassical school.

Merry-Joseph Blondel was a winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1803.

For much of Merry-Joseph Blondel's painting career, he was occupied with public commissions for paintings and frescoes in important buildings, including palaces, museums and churches.

Merry-Joseph Blondel completed major commissions for the Palace of Fontainebleau, the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum, the Brongniart Palace, the Luxembourg Palace, and the churches of StThomas Aquinas and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.

Several generations of the Merry-Joseph Blondel family had become associated with architecture and the design and decoration of buildings.

At the age of fourteen, on the advice of his maternal uncle, Merry-Joseph Blondel went to work in the office of a Notary, an experience which he would later describe as "excruciating".

However, due to a change in the system and the temporary suspension of scholarships, no students were sent to the French Academy in Rome that year and Merry-Joseph Blondel would have to wait until 1809 before he could take his place at the Villa Medici.

In 1835, Ingres returned as the director of the French Academy in Rome and Merry-Joseph Blondel appeared to be the favourite to succeed him in 1840.

Together with his second wife, Louise Emilie Delafontaine, Merry-Joseph Blondel stayed at the Villa Medici as a guest of Ingres for four months in 1839, during which time the three of them undertook a lengthy sketching tour of the Marches and Umbria.

When Merry-Joseph Blondel was unexpectedly overlooked for the position of director of the Academy in 1840, Ingres sent him a "lengthy and heartfelt" letter of condolence.

At the salon of 1817, Merry-Joseph Blondel won a gold medal for his painting depicting the Death of Louis XII.

In 1824, the year of his knighthood, Merry-Joseph Blondel was awarded a professorship at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts, a position which he occupied until his death in 1853.

In that same year, Merry-Joseph Blondel competed for a vacant seat at the Academie des beaux-arts but lost out to Ingres.

Merry-Joseph Blondel was eventually elected to a seat at the Academie in 1832.

Merry-Joseph Blondel was working on his fresco cycle at the church of St Thomas Aquinas, in the 7e arronsissement when he fell ill and died in 1853.

Merry-Joseph Blondel's entry for the salon exhibition in November 1814 was a full-sized figure painting, in oil on canvas, depicting a standing female figure, bathing in an idealised setting from classical antiquity.

Critical references to the painting would later confirm Merry-Joseph Blondel's given title for the picture as La Circassienne au Bain.