Fernand Cormon

Fernand Cormon, Fernand- Anne actually Piestre Cormon, ( born December 24, 1845 in Paris, † March 20, 1924 ) was a French painter. In his time he was a well known history painters in France, who often painted religious subjects and later occasionally turned to portraiture. His painting style is assigned to the academic realism.

Life and work

His painting studies began Cormon in Brussels with Jean -François Portaels. In 1863 he returned to Paris, where he became a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and Eugène Fromentin. Cormon never left his works in the academic line. He introduced since 1868 in the Salon de Paris in the 1880s and led his private art school, the Atelier Cormon where he instructed his students in a painting that was recognized by the jury of the Salon. Among his pupils who did not achieve this goal because their picturesque intentions from the prescribed style of the salon differed, were, among others, Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec, Louis Anquetin, Eugène Boch, Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh.

Cormon in 1880 was inducted into the Legion of Honor. He traveled to Tunisia and Brittany. Cormon in 1898 director at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the Académie des Beaux -Arts. Henri Matisse, who had visited under Cormons predecessor Gustave Moreau the École, they had to leave in 1899 due to disagreements with Cormon.

Work

Fernand Cormon was next in dark, illuminated by spotlights subjects of modern life, specializing in biblical and prehistoric scenes. In the seven -meter-long painting Caïn ( Cain ), which was the sensation of the Salon in 1880, he illustrated a verse from La legende des siècles ( The Legend of the Centuries ) by Victor Hugo: " When Cain with his draped in animal skins children, with disheveled hair, pale in the middle of the storms, fled before Jehovah, / because it was evening, the dark man came into a great plain at the foot of a mountain [ ... ] ". For this work, he worked every figure on the model and studied for their accoutrement the results of archaeological research. The painting was purchased by the French government and is now in the Musée d' Orsay in Paris.