BENOUVILLE, François-Léon

Painter, part of a French family of painters, brother of Jean-Achille Benouville. He was a student of Picot at the same time as his brother and entered the École des Beaux-Arts at the age of 16. He exhibited regularly at the SalonGLOSSARYIn the French language of the 18th and 19th centuries it designated an actual exhibition space, as well as the academic art exhibitions staged in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre since 1667. From 1737, the exhibitions took place biennially and, after the French Revolution, annually in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of the 19th century the official Salon jury was dissolved in order to make way for a committee of state-approved artists, i.e. former Salon members, who created the highly influential Société des Artistes Français. from 1838 and won the Prix de RomeGLOSSARYA scholarship, founded concurrently with the French Academy in Rome (1666), that enabled prize-winning students at the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris to spend a period (usually 4 years) in Rome at the state's expense. Prizes for architecture began to be awarded regularly in 1723, and prizes for engravers and musicians were added in the 19th century. The prizes were meant to perpetuate the academic tradition and during the 18th and 19th centuries winning the award was the traditional stepping stone to the highest honours for painters and sculptors. Many distinguished artists (as well as many nonentities) were Prix de Rome winners, notably David, Fragonard, and Ingres among painters and Clodion, Girardon, and Houdon among sculptors. The prizes are still awarded and the system has been adopted by other countries. in 1845 (the same year as his brother) with his Christ before the Tribunal (Paris, École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-Arts), the almost violent intensity of expression and realismGLOSSARYRealism (with an upper case "R"), also known as the Realist school, denotes a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked. Typically it involved some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects. One of the main representatives and spokesmen was the painter Gustave Courbet. In the dispute about ways to represent reality, Realism rebelled against the idealistic and classicist tendencies in painting. of which is rare in paintings of this period. In Rome he became interested in Early Christian art, from which he acquired a sense of the monumental without being distracted from his search for realism, as exemplified in Martyrs Led away to their Ordeal (1855; Paris, Louvre).

In 1852 he and Alexandre Cabanel, with whom he shared the prestigious prix de Rome in 1845, made several decorative paintings (now destroyed) for the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Tragically, few large-scale compositions remain by this artist. Considered by many to be among the most promising history painters of his time, Benouville died of typhoid fever at the age of thirty-eight.