André Giroux was a renowned French photographer and painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

. His paintings were mostly Landscape art

Landscape art

Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...

 and Genre painting, one of which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In particular, he restored several Genre paintings of medieval ruins

Ruins

Ruins are the remains of human-made architecture: structures that were once complete, as time went by, have fallen into a state of partial or complete disrepair, due to lack of maintenance or deliberate acts of destruction...

 and troubadour

Troubadour

A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....

s. Giroux was also a well established art dealer and gave up painting to promote his business selling curiosities. Giroux's work is extensively discussed in Steven Adams' doctoral thesis from the University of Leeds in 2003.

Background

Born in Paris, he was son to François-Simon-Alphonse Giroux, maker of camera

Camera

A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

 equipment for Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. He attended École des Beaux-Arts

École des Beaux-Arts

École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...

 beginning in 1821, and was a student of Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era...

.

He was also known for using the cliché-verre technique.

Awards

• Prix de Rome en Paysage Historique — 1825, Winner (with Chasse de Méléagre)
• Légion d'honneur
  Légion d'honneur
  The Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...
  
  — 1870, Chevalier