Jean-Achille Benouville

1815 – 1891

French painter, part of a family of painters, brother of François-Léon Benouville. He was a pupil of François-Edouard Picot until he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1837. From 1834 he exhibited at the Salon many landscapes of the surroundings of Paris, Compiègne and Besançon that were sometimes similar to the works of his friend Corot. These landscapes were painted directly from nature and show his considerable sensitivity to variations in light. In 1845 he won the Prix de Rome for historical landscape with Ulysses and Nausicaa (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris), which was a great success with the critics. He remained faithful for the rest of his career to the French tradition of historical landscape inspired by Claude Lorrain with works such as the Colosseum Seen from the Palatine (1870; Musée du Louvre, Paris).

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