Émile-René Ménard was a French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 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...

 born in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. From early childhood he was immersed in an artistic environment: Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century...

, Millet

Jean-François Millet

Jean-François Millet was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France...

 and the Barbizon

Barbizon school

The Barbizon school of painters were part of a movement towards realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870...

 painters frequented his family home, familiarizing him thus with both landscape and antique subjects.

Ménard studied at the Academy Jullian from 1880 after having been a student of Baudry, Bouguereau, and Henri Lehmann

Henri Lehmann

Henri Lehmann was a German-born French historical painter and portraitist.__NOEDITSECTION__-Life:Born Heinrich Salem Lehmann in Kiel, Schleswig, Germany, he received his first art tuition from his father Leo Lehmann and from other painters in Hamburg...

. He participated in the Salon of the Secession in Munich, and the Salon de la Libre Esthétique in Brussels during 1897. Several personal exhibitions were also devoted to him at the Georges Small Gallery. In 1921 he exhibited in the Twelfth Salon along with Henri Martin and Edmond Aman-Jean

Edmond Aman-Jean

Edmond François Aman-Jean was a French symbolist painter, who co-founded the Salon des Tuileries in 1923....

. Galleries in Buffalo, New York

Buffalo, New York

Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...

 and Boston, Massachusetts exposed Menard and his art to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. However, the numerous commissions that Ménard received from the French government crowned his career; for example, the cycle for the Hautes Etudes à la Sorbonne, the Faculté de Droit, and the fresco Atoms for the Chemistry institute, and finally the Caise des Dépôts in Marseilles.

Ménard's art allies a rigorous, clear classicism with a diffuse and dreamlike brushwork. In 1894, Victor Shoe wrote of Menard in l' Art et la Vie (Art and Life): "visions of a pacified, bathed nature, of dawn and of twilight, where the soul seems to immerse itself in the innocence of daybreak, and breathe the divine anointment that comes with the dawn."