French painter, especially noted for his travels in Greece and the Ottoman Empire and his numerous paintings with Orientalist and Philhellene themes. He became the official painter to Jérôme Bonaparte in Kassel (Westphalia) in 1811. In this capacity he received a pension to stay in Italy, then to discover Greece and Constantinople, where he stayed between February and September 1819. He often traveled and changed his work location, including Paris, Kassel (1811-14), Naples (1814-16), Rome (1816-19, 1824-31), Naples (1819-20), Istanbul (ca. 1820), Greece (c. 1820), Paris (1820-37), and Vienna (1820-24). His visit to Greece was on the very eve of the Greek War of Independence. //