Decamps, Alexandre

▪ French painter

in full  Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps 

born March 3, 1803, Paris, France

died August 22, 1860, Barbizon

      one of the first French painters of the 19th century to turn from Neoclassicism to Romanticism.

      In his youth Decamps traveled in the Middle East and painted the life and scenery of that part of the world with a bold fidelity to nature, using a technique that was marked by dramatic contrasts of colour and of light and shade and that made his works the puzzle of conventional critics. His powers, however, soon came to be recognized, and he was ranked at the time along with Eugène Delacroix (Delacroix, Eugène) and Joseph Vernet (Vernet, Joseph) as one of the leaders of French painting.

      His subjects embraced an unusually wide range. As a result of his travels in the Middle East, he was perhaps one of the first European painters to represent biblical scenes with a natural local background. Of this class were his Joseph Sold by His Brethren (1838), Moses Taken from the Nile (1837), and his scenes from the life of Samson, consisting of nine vigorous sketches in charcoal and white. Perhaps the most impressive of his historical pictures is his Defeat of the Cimbrians (1833). Decamps also produced a number of genre pictures, chiefly of scenes from French and Algerian domestic life, done with humour. Similarly, in various paintings and sketches he depicted such animals as dogs, horses, and monkeys with a marvelous humour; probably the best known of all his works is The Experts (c. 1837), a clever satire of the jury of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which had rejected several of his earlier works. Most of his life was passed in the neighbourhood of Paris. He died after he was thrown from a horse while hunting at Fontainebleau.

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