Fernand Cormon was a French painter born in Paris. He became a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel

Alexandre Cabanel

Alexandre Cabanel was a French painter.- Biography :Cabanel was born in Montpellier, Hérault. He painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the academic style. He was also well known as a portrait painter...

, Eugène Fromentin

Eugène Fromentin

Eugène Fromentin was a French painter and writer.He was born in La Rochelle. After leaving school he studied for some years under Louis Cabat, the landscape painter...

, and Jean-François Portaels

Jean-François Portaels

Jean-François Portaels was a Belgian orientalist painter and director of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.- Life :...

, and one of the leading historical painters of modern France.

At an early age he attracted attention for the perceived sensationalism

Sensationalism

Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers...

 in his art, although for a time his powerful brush dwelled with particular delight on scenes of bloodshed, such as the Murder in the Seraglio (1868) and the Death of Ravara, Queen of Lanka at the Toulouse

Toulouse

Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...

 Museum. The Musée d'Orsay

Musée d'Orsay

The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture,...

 has his Cain flying before Jehovah's Curse; and for the Mairie of the fourth arrondissement of Paris he executed in grisaille

Grisaille

Grisaille is a term for painting executed entirely in monochrome or near-monochrome, usually in shades of grey. It is particularly used in large decorative schemes in imitation of sculpture. Many grisailles in fact include a slightly wider colour range, like the Andrea del Sarto fresco...

 a series of panels: Birth, Death, Marriage, War, etc. A Chiefs Funeral, and a series of large paintings for the Museum of natural history in Paris with themes from the Stone Age

Stone Age

The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period, lasting about 2.5 million years , during which humans and their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporary genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, widely used exclusively stone as their hard material in the...

, occupied him for several years. He was appointed to the Legion of Honor

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...

 in 1880. Subsequently he also devoted himself to portraiture.

Being well-accepted at the annual Salon, he also ran an art school, the Atelier Cormon in the 1880s where he tried to guide his students to create paintings which would be accepted by the Salon's jury. Among his students with whom he was unsuccessful on this point were, for instance: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern...

, Louis Anquetin

Louis Anquetin

Louis Anquetin was a French painter.Anquetin was born in Étrépagny, France and educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen....

, Eugène Boch

Eugène Boch

Eugène Boch was a Belgian painter, born in Saint-Waast, Nord, Hainaut, and the younger brother of Anna Boch, a founding member of Les XX....

, Paul Tampier, Émile Bernard

Émile Bernard

Émile Henri Bernard is known as a Post-Impressionist painter who had artistic friendships with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Eugene Boch, and at a later time, Cézanne. Most of his notable work was accomplished at a young age, in the years 1886 through 1897. He is also associated with Cloisonnism and...

 and Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...

. Other students included Alphonse Osbert

Alphonse Osbert

Alphonse Osbert was a French Symbolist painter.Educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, his earliest passion was for the great Spanish masters, particularly Jusepe de Ribera. A shift away from his academic style took place in the late 1880s under the influence of several acquaintances associated with...

.

Cormon died in a traffic accident in Paris.

Gallery

Despite his moment of glory as a Beaux-Arts professor, he was almost forgotten by 1924 when he was run over by a taxi outside his studio, and is barely remembered today save as the teacher of more illustrious pupils. [from David Sweetman's "Toulouse Lautrec and the fin-de-siecle"]

External links

• Atelier Cormon ~1885 (note e.g. [from left; mind inscriptions] Toulouse-Lautrec, Tampier, Anquetin; last row, second after sculpture, É. Bernard.