Édouard Cibot

• 1. Introduction

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  Édouard Cibot spent the first half of his long career painting scenes from sacred history for the churches of Paris, then, around 1863, he walked away from all of it. A painter who had devoted decades to religious commissions turned to the open air and the quiet of landscape. What drives an artist to rebuild his practice from scratch in the middle of his life? And what did he leave behind that Parisians can still see today?

• 2. Formation and Masters

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  Cibot was born in Paris in 1799, and the city would shape his entire working life. His full name was François Barthélemy Michel Édouard Cibot, though he went by Édouard. His training came under two painters: Guérin and Picot. Both were figures in the French academic tradition, and under their guidance Cibot absorbed the conventions of historical painting that would anchor his early career. That grounding in history and religious narrative gave him the tools for the ambitious church commissions that followed.

• 3. Sacred Work in Paris Churches

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  The churches of Paris became the primary exhibition space for Cibot's early ambitions. He produced many sacred works for them across the first part of his career, and several are still visible in those buildings today. The most significant among them is a series of paintings representing Charity, housed in the church of St. Leu in Paris. The series is his most important work of the historical phase. Among his exhibited canvases during this period was The Loves of the Angels, completed in 1835, and Regina Coeli in 1846, followed by St. Theresa in 1847.

• 4. The Landscape Turn

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  Around 1863, Cibot applied himself to landscape painting. The shift was not gradual; the source marks a distinct turning point. His earlier canvas Chestnut-trees at Aulnay, from 1855, may hint at a growing interest in natural subjects, but the formal commitment came only after 1863. Works like The Gouffre, near Seineport, dated 1864, entered the Luxembourg Gallery, giving the landscape phase an immediate institutional foothold. View at Soisy-sur-Ecolle followed in 1865. The earlier Park at Orsay, from 1857, suggests that landscapes had been on his mind even before the turn became official.

• 5. A Career's Span

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  Among Cibot's works spanning both phases, Convicts in 1788 from 1836 stands apart as a subject that fits neither the purely sacred nor the purely landscape categories. It points to a broader historical curiosity. Cibot died in Paris in 1877, the same city where he was born nearly eight decades earlier. His career stretched from the France of the Restoration era through the Second Empire and into the Third Republic, a period of sweeping political change. The painting The Gouffre, near Seineport, which found its place in the Luxembourg Gallery, remains a traceable marker of where his late work was valued.