French painter, pastelist, and engraver. He lived all his life in Paris. In 1868 he trained initially as a singer, attending courses in the morning at the École des Beaux-Arts and studying for periods with Gérôme. He exhibited at the first time 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. in 1870. From 1871 he was rejected each time at the Salon until 1876, when he had a big success.
From the mid-1870s he was influenced by Monet and Sisley and changed to ImpressionismGLOSSARYA style of painting that became prominent in the last quarter of the 19th century as a reaction to the ossified doctrine of the Academy and the content-oriented atelier, historical, and genre painting. The name is derived from the 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, and first was used by art critics as a mocking description for a group of artists excluded from the official Salon, but who had their own first group exhibition in 1874 at the salon of the Parisian photographer Nadar. Impressionism, as a new type of naturalism, negated classical pictorial methods; based on contemporary theories of physics, it indicated the natural object in a revolutionary fashion - entirely as a manifestation of colour. Their supreme principle was "plein-air" or open-air painting, through which the painters tried to capture a direct, spontaneous impression of what they saw., and in 1880 and 1881 he exhibited at the 5th and 6th Impressionist exhibitions. His painting is full of social criticism in his depictions of the poor areas of Paris, in their subdued tones his paintings are close to 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.. He also painted portraits and later above all landscapes in and around Paris. In 1889 he received a gold medal at the World Fair.
He invented the Raffaëlli paint, which has the properties of both oils and watercolours.
