Paul-Jacques-Aime Baudry

Life

Baudry was born in 1828 in La Roche-sur-Yon in the Vendée (France). He studied art under Michel Martin Drolling and enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in 1845. He won the Prix de Rome in 1850 for his picture of Zenobia found on the banks of the Araxes.

His talent from the first revealed itself as strictly academical, full of elegance and grace, but somewhat lacking originality. In the course of his residence in Italy Baudry derived strong inspiration from Italian art with the mannerism of Correggio, as was very evident in the two works he exhibited in the Salon of 1857, which were purchased for the Luxembourg: The Martyrdom of a Vestal Virgin and The Child.

His Leda, St John the Baptist, and a Portrait of Beul, exhibited at the same time, took a first prize that year. Throughout this early period Baudry commonly selected mythological or fanciful subjects, one of the most noteworthy being The Pearl and the Wave (1862).

Once only did he attempt an historical picture, Charlotte Corday after the assassination of Marat (1861); and returned by preference to the former class of subjects or to painting portraits of illustrious men of his day: Guizot, Charles Garnier, Edmond About.

The works that crowned Baudry's reputation were his mural decorations, which show much imagination and a high artistic gift for color, as may be seen in the frescoes in the Paris Court of Cassation, at the château de Chantilly, and some private residences the Hôtel Fould and Hôtel Paivabut, above all, in the decorations of the foyer of the Opera Garnier.

These, more than thirty paintings in all, and among them compositions figurative of dancing and music, occupied the painter for ten years. Baudry was a member of the Académie des beaux-arts, succeeding Jean-Victor Schnetz.

Baudry died in Paris in 1886.

Honours

1878 : Member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium

Legacy

Two of his colleagues, Paul Dubois and Marius Jean Mercié, co-operating with his brother, Baudry the architect, erected his funeral monument in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (1890).

The statue of Baudry at La Roche-sur-Yon (1897) is by Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Works by Schelfhout were displayed in the exhibition L'Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925 in Paris. The exhibition was part of the major international exhibition Arts Décoratifs . Works by Schelfhout were also present at the Exposition Hollandaise exhibition in the Musée Jeu de Paume from 10 April to 31 May 1926 . Schelfhout made various Stations of the Cross and designs for stained glass church windows. His wife had become a Catholic around World War I, and he himself became a Catholic in 1927.

In his later years Schelhout also made many engravings (226 pieces). On the occasion of his fiftieth birthday in 1931, his wife organized a committee to donate engravings to the Rijksmuseum. She managed to donate 35 pieces. Lodewijk Schelfhout died on November 5, 1943.

Source : wiki