Jules Coignet

1798 – 1860

Jules-Louis-Philippe Coignet, French painter, draftsman, and lithographer. He studied with the influential Neoclassical landscape painter Jean-Victor Bertin and in 1821 was among the competitors for the Rome Prize in Historical Landscape. From 1824 until 1857 he regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon, winning a gold medal in 1824. A constant traveler in search of picturesque motifs, he carried his explorations as far as Egypt and Syria. Although he had begun as a painter in the tradition of the composed, "historical" landscape, his Salon submissions were for the most part topographical views, based on oil studies painted out-of-doors. In these studies, he showed himself a fluent colourist, sensitive to effects of light and atmosphere: in short, a naturalist, whose painterly, observation-based work contains no trace of Neoclassical stylisation. A prolific and careful draftsman, Coignet produced a large body of pencil drawings (many of them now at the Musée d'Art of Clermont-Ferrand) that deal in a fairly prosaic way with topographic views and landscape details such as trees, shrubbery, and rocks. Some of these were intended for lithographic reproduction in the books on landscape that Coignet published.

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