1959 Pierre-Paul Prud'hon French Art Exhibition Print. Original art exhibition print promoting an art exhibition at Musee de Dijon as a commemoration of the bicentenary of the artist's birth. Printed on lightly textured matte paper in France.

Size: 12.6”W x 17.3”H. 

Condition: Good condition with crease through bottom section and top left corner. Couple of pin holes from being displayed at some point. Faint age spots and paper discoloration from natural age.

About the Artist - Pierre-Paul Prud'hon

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon was born on April 4, 1758, in Cluny, France, the tenth son of a stonecutter in Burgundy. He began studying painting in Dijon at sixteen and arrived in Paris in 1780, but it was his years in Italy from 1784 to 1787 that truly shaped his art. There, in Rome, he became acquainted with the Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova and admired the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Correggio, whose influence pushed him to bring a softer, more sensual effect into French painting at a time when the field was dominated by the austere, sculptural style of Jacques-Louis David. He had married Jeanne Pennet back in Cluny in 1778, and the couple had six children.

Back in Paris, Prud'hon initially made his living drawing for engravers and painting portraits, and he became an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, producing mythological and republican allegorical drawings that were engraved and published by his friend Jacques-Louis Copia. His career gained real momentum under Napoleon: in 1801, the emperor began favoring him with commissions for portraits, ceiling decorations, and allegorical paintings, and he went on to paint Empress Josephine. One of his most celebrated works from this period is "Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime" (1804–1808), a large canvas commissioned for the criminal tribunal hall of the Palais de Justice and now held in the Louvre. Eugène Delacroix later singled out allegory as his true gift, writing that it was Prud'hon's true domain. In 1816 Prud'hon was elected to the Institut de France.

From 1803 onward, Prud'hon worked so closely with the painter Constance Mayer, his pupil, collaborator, and longtime companion, that it is often difficult to separate their individual contributions on shared canvases. Their partnership ended in tragedy when Mayer took her own life in his studio in May 1821. Prud'hon fell into a deep depression, and though he completed one final Salon submission, the poignant "Une Famille dans la désolation" (A Grief-Stricken Family), begun as a collaboration with Mayer and finished after her death, he did not long survive her. He died in Paris on February 16, 1823, at the age of 64. Though grounded in classical texts and Neoclassical training, his dreamy, melancholic sensibility placed him at the threshold of Romanticism, and he would go on to influence younger artists like Théodore Géricault.