Artist

(b. 1783, Toulon, d. 1855, Paris)

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Details

Paulin-Jean-Baptiste Guérin (also Paulin-Guérin), French painter. The son of a locksmith he began his life in poverty, painting a number of self-portraits as he could not afford models. It was only in 1810, at the relatively late age of twenty-seven, that he made his way to Paris to exhibit his works at the Salon, showing only portraits, while his first composition piece, Cain after the Death of Abel, for which he received critical acclaim and which was purchased by the government, was exhibited in 1812 (Toulon, Musée Toulon). His real successes were not in the rather wooden religious subjects which he preferred however, but in the lively, fresh and colourful portraits that he produced to earn his living. Guérin was the official painter to the royal family during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and he remained loyal to the Bourbons after 1830. His early style is rooted in the 18th century tradition of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and, indeed, of some of the great English portrait painters. He achieves in both his portraits and composition pieces a Neoclassical personality all of his own, chiefly through his idiosyncratic use of colour, light, and a very particular form of sfumato which, of course, also distinguishes the paintings of his contemporary Romantic painters Pierre-Paul Prud'hon and Anne Louis Girodet. There is something more to Guérin's portraits though, that seems to prefigure great portraits from the next generation such as those of Gustave Courbet, and in particular his own self-portrait of 1844, Desperate Man (private collection). //

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Category	Artists
Artists by letter	G
Artist nationality	French