Auguste-Xavier Leprince (August 28, 1799 – December 26, 1826) was a French artist and painter who attained celebrity at the age of seventeen. His patrons included the Duchesse de Berry, Charles X, and Alexandre du Sommerard. He was also a teacher; in his twenties he established his own atelier in Paris, with pupils including his two younger brothers, Robert-Léopold and Pierre-Gustave,Gustave's first name is given as Pierre in Errera, Isabella, Répertoire des peintures datées, Bruxelles: G. van Oest, 1920-1921, vol. 2, p. 544. as well as Eugène Lepoittevin and Nicolas Alexandre Barbier. His meteoric career came to an abrupt end and his "brilliant promise was cut short by his premature death at the age of twenty-seven."Dayot, Armand. "The Centennial Fine Art Exhibition in the Champ de Mars" in Art and Letters: An Illustrated Review, London: Boussard, Valadon & Cie; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, July 1889, p. 115.
Early success with pastoral subjects
Xavier Leprince was born in Paris, the son of Anne-Pierre Leprince (said to be a painter and lithographer, but about whom little is knownMarumo, p. 33: Leprince was the son "d'un peintre dont on ne connait que le nom, Anne-Pierre Leprince.") and Marie-Adélaïde-Florentine Datir.Bellier de La Chavignerie and Aubray, p. 1017, gives her name as "Datis". Alexandre du Sommerard, who became one of his patrons, indicates that Xavier was essentially a self-taught artist, saying his early paintings were created "almost without any other guide than nature."Du Sommerard (1827).The claim that Leprince was self-taught is repeated in Notice de tableaux…, p. 3.
His earliest known works, dating from 1816 to 1819, mostly depict livestock and their keepers in pastoral settings. These precocious works gained for the teenaged Leprince "a celebrity confirmed by the exorbitant prices set, by the merchants themselves, for his first productions." Art historians see in these early works the influence of 17th-century Dutch landscape and animal painters Adriaen van de Velde, Adriaen van Ostade and Isaac van Ostade,Marumo, p. 33 and the French landscape artist Jean-Louis de Marne.
Leprince made his salon debut at age nineteen, exhibiting six paintings, all landscapes or rural subjects, at the Paris Salon of 1819,Explication... 1819 where he was awarded a medal.
His expertise at depicting farming life in rural France reached a new level with his 1822 work La moisson, a painting of laborers harvesting a field, which was purchased by Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, duchesse de Berry, who also collected Leprince's 1823 painting of ice-skaters, Les Patineurs.Bonnemaison.Bolton and Strachen. She may also have commissioned from Leprince a painting depicting guests listening to music in her grove at the Hermitage of Enghien at Montmorency, known from a lithograph.Flamand-Grétry, Louis Victor. Cause célèbre relative à la consécration du eœur de Grétry..., Paris: Impr. de Chaignieau fils aîné, 1824, unnumbered page.
Leprince's 1823 painting, Embarquement des bestiaux sur le Passager dans le port de Honfleur (Embarkation of Cattle on the Passager at the Port of Honfleur), emblematic of the cattle paintings of the era, was of singular importance to his career. Féréol Bonnemaison wrote that it "placed M. Leprince among our best genre painters. His career is now gloriously open before him."Bonnemaison: "Cet ouvrage…a placé M. Leprince parmi nos meilleurs peintres de genre. La carrière est maintenant glorieusement ouverte devant lui." The painting was purchased by Charles X for 3,000 francs,Bellier de La Chavignerie and Aubray, p. 1015. and is now in the Louvre.
Other genres Moving beyond pastoral subjects, Leprince also painted marine art, scenes of Parisian life, works in the troubadour style, portraits, and the Forest of Fontainebleau, which had just begun to attract a new generation of French artists.
He also specialized in painting the human figures for a number of landscape painters, including Nicolas Alexandre Barbier,Gabet, p. 25.Marmottan, p. 73. Étienne Bouhot,Lazard, Lucien. "Les Peintres de Paris: Étienne Bouhot" in Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de Paris et de l'Ile-de-France, Paris: H. Champion, 1901, p. 65. Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy,Lejeune, p. 391. André Giroux,Gabet p. 314.Marmottan, p. 142. Charles-Caïus Renoux,Gabet, p. 588. and .Gabet, p. 665.Vatout, J. Souvenirs historiques des résidences royales de France, Paris: Firmin Didot frères et cie, 1837, p. 350. This practice of being a "general contractor" to artists "who do not have the courage to study the figures of men or animals to adorn their works" was criticized by one writer, who argued that it would surely "detach many jewels from his crown in public esteem." The critic nonetheless praised Leprince's "wit, verve, originality, finesse, and great facility in composition and execution."Miel, pp. 109 and 366-368: "M. Xavier Leprince…me paraît avoir de l'esprit, de la verve, de l'originalité, de la finesse, et une grande facilité, soit dans sa composition, soit dans son exécution.…Je regrette enfin que M. Xavier Leprincè se soit constitué l'entrepreneur-général de tontes les figures de nos paysagistes, qui ne se sentent pas le courage d'étudier la figure de l'homme ou des animaux pour en orner leurs ouvrages. Cela peut lui donner quelque importance auprès de ses amis et de ses tributaires; mais assurément cela ne peut que détacher bien des fleurons de sa couronne dans l'estime publique."
Leprince's skill at figure painting was appreciated by Corot,Robaut, Alfred. L’oeuvre de Corot, Paris: H. Floury, 1905, vol. 4, p. 97 (No. 3103, Carnet 66, vers 1825): "Tâcher d'voir à copier des figures de Le Prince." and speculates that Corot was influenced by Leprince.Tinterow, p. 111: "One can easily imagine other possible influences: for instance, that of Auguste-Xavier Leprince…"
Works such as the watercolor A Ceremony on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, dated 1821, provide evidence of travel to Italy.
In 1822, from the Société des Amis des Arts, Leprince received a commission to commemorate the valiant efforts of French doctors and nuns who had traveled to Barcelona in response to an epidemic of yellow fever, which killed an estimated 20,000 inhabitants. The resulting painting was an ambitious panorama with more than forty figures, variously called Peste de Barcelone or Les Médecins français et les Sœurs de Saint-Camille à Barcelone. La Nouveauté called it a "very remarkable" work "which announced a very distinguished talent."La Nouveauté, Paris: Imprimerie de L. Bouchard, No. 497, 10 January 1827, "Nécrologie" on pp. 2-3: "…la Peste de Barcelone, que nous avons vue en 823 à la Société des amis des arts, sont des productions fort remarquables et qui annoncent un talent très-distingué." The painting was praised and minutely described by Charles Paul Landon in a volume of his Annales du Musée et de l'École moderne des beaux-arts, which included a fold-out reproduction, currently the only known image of Leprince's painting.Landon. pp. 53-56 and plates 31-32.
In 1824, inspired to paint the coast of Normandy, Leprince began sharing a studio with Eugène Isabey at Honfleur.
Patronage of du Sommerard By 1822, the year Leprince turned 23, his talents as a painter had attracted the patronage of the antiquarian Alexandre du Sommerard, whose collection of medieval art and artifacts would become the Musée de Cluny. Du Sommerard included lithographs of four works by Leprince in his highly influential Vues de Provins, which also included four works by Xavier's younger brother, Léopold Leprince.Du Sommerard, Alexandre (1822). The book, an illustrated tour of medieval churches and abbeys, many of them reduced to ruins in the violence of the French Revolution, was part of an artistic and literary movement, the troubadour style, that romanticized the Middle Ages in France. About Leprince's Vue de la partie des fortifications dite le Trou du Chat, the art historian Pierre Bénard writes, "Is there not something Virgilian in the peaceful herd immortalized by Xavier Leprince at the foot of a tower of the ramparts?"Bénard (1988), p. 13: "N'y a-t-il rien de virgilien dans le troupeau paisible immortalisé par Xavier Leprince au pied d'une tour des remparts?"
At the Paris Salon of 1824, Leprince exhibited a full-length portrait of his patron, listed in the catalogue as Portrait en pied de M. du S… dans son cabinet. Its location is unknown.
At the time of his death, Leprince left unfinished two paintings commissioned by du Sommerard. One was The Artist's Studio. The other depicted an elderly collector conferring with a Jewish antiques dealer and surrounded by prized artifacts from his collection, entitled L’Antiquaire (The Antiquarian). To complete this painting, du Sommerard commissioned another of his protégés, Charles-Caïus Renoux, who did so "with rare talent."Béraud, Antony. Annales du Musée et de l'école moderne des beaux-arts, Paris: Landon, 1827, pp. 165 and 173. It was displayed in the Paris Salon of 1827. A contemporary reviewer noted that "at the time of Xavier Leprince's death, the two figures alone were made, and the rest was hardly sketched out. It is M. Renoux who was commissioned to complete this interior," consisting of furniture, armor, and numerous objets d'art from the Middle Ages; "finally everything comes together to make this painting a precious piece.""Musée Royal: Exposition de 1827", Journal des artistes, Paris: Société libre des beaux-arts, 6 April 1828, p. 211: "Nous devons déclarer que lors de la mort de Xavier Leprince, les deux figures seules étaient faites, et que le reste était à peine ébauché. C'est M. Renoux qui a été chargé…d'achever cet intérieur qui représente son curieux cabinet…enfin tout se réunit pour faire de ce tableau un morceau précieux." The contemporary critic Auguste Jal declared the painting "a perfect work."Jal, p. 318: "L'Antiquaire est un ouvrage parfait." L’Antiquaire has been cited by modern scholars researching the history of antiquarianism and the invention of the modern museum.See for example Stephen Bann, the chapter "Poetics of the Museum: Lenoir and du Sommeard" in The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth Century Britain and France, Cambridge University Press, 1984, which reproduces the painting on p. 80. The painting is also reproduced in Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, editors, Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, Taylor & Francis, 2004, figure 1.4.1. The reproductions are from a lithograph, in black and white; the location of the painting is unknown.
The Artist's Studio and artists en plein air At an unusually early age, especially if he was in fact a self-taught painter, Leprince opened an atelier and accepted pupils. In the last year of his life he began work on a highly detailed painting depicting himself and his circle of artists, students, and patrons, following in the tradition of atelier paintings such as Louis-Léopold Boilly's Gathering of Artists in the Studio of Isabey (1798).The highly detailed canvas shows how artists worked, what tools were used, and how brushes were held. Plaster casts of well-known classical sculptures, including the Laocöon and the Venus de Milo, are displayed around the room. Two classical busts, perched high on a shelf at right, appear to look down like spectators on the informal assembly of students, patrons, and critics. Leprince is the figure seen from the back in profile seated before the large painting to the right of center. The canvas he is working on is Loading of Livestock at Honfleur, which he exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1824 and was purchased two years later by King Charles X of France. The inscription on the stretcher notes that this painting was commissioned by M. du Sommerard, Leprince's chief patron. In 1869 it was purchased by Octave de Labastie, the figure seated before an easel, fifth from the left.