Hortense Haudebourt-lescot

1784 – 1845

Antoinette-Cécile-Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, French painter. At the age of seven she became a pupil of Guillaume Lethière, a family friend and popular history painter who was appointed director of the Académie de France in Rome in 1807. She followed him to Rome in 1808 and remained there until 1816, depicting the customs and costumes of the Italian peasantry in veristic detail. This experience abroad, rare for a woman artist, was a decisive influence on her art which in its picturesque and anecdotal images of everyday Italian life prefigured the work of the later genre specialists. She regularly exhibited her work at the Paris Salon, showing some 110 paintings there between 1811 and 1840. She married the architect Louis-Pierre Haudebourt (1788-1849) in 1820, and died in Paris in 1845.

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