Curated playlist
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
- Orson WellesOrson Welles was born on the 6th of May 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and died on the 10th of October 1985. In between those dates, he directed what is consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made, terrified radio listeners…
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski was born on the 18th of August 1933 in interbellum Paris, the child of two agnostics from very different worlds. His mother was raised Catholic despite having a Jewish father. His father was a Jewish painter and sculptor…
- Eugène DelacroixEugène Delacroix once heard the poet and critic Baudelaire describe him this way: "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible." That tension defines the French Romantic…
- Gustave MoreauGustave Moreau left instructions that his death on the 18th of April 1898 was not to be announced in the press. His funeral was to be small and simple. Any flowers sent were to be placed not on his grave, but on the grave of Alexandrine…
- Jacques-Louis DavidJacques-Louis David was born in Paris on the 30th of August 1748, into a world of powdered wigs, gilded ceilings, and a painting style built on prettiness. He would spend his life tearing all of it down. By the time he died on the 29th of…
- Antoine-Jean GrosAntoine-Jean Gros was born in Paris on the 16th of March 1771, the son of two painters, in a city on the edge of revolution. By the time he died on the 25th of June 1835, he had painted the most celebrated image of Napoleon Bonaparte that…
- Horace VernetHorace Vernet was born on the 30th of June 1789 inside the Paris Louvre itself, while his parents sheltered there during the French Revolution. That detail alone tells you something about the world he entered. He came from a dynasty of…
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique IngresJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres died at eighty-six on the 14th of January 1867, in his apartment on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, and his studio held more than four thousand drawings. He left them all to the city of Montauban, the southern…
- Jean-Léon GérômeJean-Léon Gérôme was born on the 11th of May 1824 in Vesoul, a small town in the Haute-Saône region of France, and by 1880 he had become arguably the most famous living artist in the world. That rise was not built on one triumphant canvas…
- François GérardFrançois Pascal Simon Gérard was known across Europe by a single phrase: the painter of kings, the king of painters. Born in Rome on the 4th of May 1770, the son of a French embassy official and an Italian mother, he grew up between two…
- Louis ViscontiLouis Tullius Joachim Visconti was born in Rome on the 11th of February 1791, into a family so entwined with antiquity that the past was practically the family business. His grandfather had founded the Vatican Museums. His father was a…
- Paul DelarochePaul Delaroche painted a man being led to his death while an archbishop stretched his arms from a prison window to bless him. No heroic light bathed the scene. No flattering angle softened the horror. Delaroche wanted you to feel the…