Léon Bonnat 

Biography of Léon Bonnat  ( 1833-1922 )

Born in Bayonne in 1833, Léon Bonnat lived with his family in Madrid between 1846 and 1853. He discovered his vocation while visiting the Prado Museum galleries with his father and received his first training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in the Spanish capital. In Paris, between 1854 and 1857, he studied at Léon Cogniet's studio and the École des Beaux-Arts, then stayed in Rome between 1858 and 1861, without being a resident of the Académie de France since, in 1857, on his fourth attempt at the Prix de Rome competition, he only received a Second Grand Prize. Although he had already exhibited three portraits at the Paris Salon in 1857 and sent his first major religious compositions from Rome to the Salons of 1859 and 1861, his career as a great Parisian painter did not really begin until his return from Italy and after he settled in Paris in March 1861.

Like any ambitious young painter, Bonnat wanted to succeed in the grand genre, particularly in religious painting, which took biblical themes and treated them in large formats intended for churches. The first important works he exhibited at the Salon were The Good Samaritan (1859), Adam and Eve Finding Abel (1861), and The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew (1863). Success was assured: these three works were purchased by the State and earned him his first official awards. At the same time, his Italian compositions, in a genre that was very fashionable at the time, and which he produced ‘with a view to selling’, were highly successful, as evidenced by the purchase of Mariuccia by Princess Mathilde in 1861, Pilgrims at the Feet of the Statue of Saint Peter in Saint Peter's Church in Rome by Empress Eugénie in 1864, and the purchase and commissioning of works by Goupil and Paul Durand-Ruel.
In 1866, he received his first commissions from the State for large decorative compositions for the Palais de Justice in Paris. However, the Salon's Medal of Honour, the highest recognition for a young artist, was denied him in 1863 and 1866 – each time a huge disappointment – before finally being awarded to him in 1869.

Before becoming the great portraitist of the Third Republic from 1875 onwards, known to all for his iconic representations of the personalities of his time, Bonnat was first recognised for his talent as a painter of the grand genre, in religious painting and then in large decorative compositions for public buildings.

Between 1858 and 1861, Bonnat was able to fulfil every young painter's dream of travelling to Italy, discovering the great masters of the Renaissance in Rome, Naples and Florence, and learning his craft by studying and copying their work. The second dream of every artist, the ‘journey to the East’, which Bonnat also contemplated, would come true later, when he was already a recognised artist, when his friend Jean-Léon Gérôme invited him to join the expedition he was organising for his third trip to the region in the first half of 1868, and he accepted the invitation. The group of young painters, led by Gérôme, began their journey in Cairo, visited Fayoum, crossed the Sinai to reach Aqaba, passed through Petra, crossed the Araba, the Negev and Judea to reach Jerusalem, then Beirut before embarking on their return journey. Bonnat brought back from his four-month trip numerous studies of landscapes, remarkable sites (Jerusalem, the Mar Saba monastery, the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo) and a few genre scenes.
Small in size and quickly sketched, these studies were not intended for sale, but were meant to capture certain travel memories for future Orientalist compositions created later in the studio.

Indeed, the 1868 trip to the Orient was followed, between 1868 and 1876, by a significant amount of work in the studio, producing Orientalist genre scenes in large-format paintings intended for the Salon, whose subjects were chosen by the painter himself or, in the case of the later works, it seems, by his patrons. During this short period, Bonnat thus took his place in ‘the long caravan of artists who make up Orientalism’. His position as a leading portraitist and the resulting high demand, both in France and abroad, after 1875, following the presentation at the 1875 Salon of the Portrait of Mme Pasca, followed at the 1877 Salon by the Portrait of Adolphe Thiers, then at the 1879 Salon with the Portrait of Victor Hugo, but also his numerous obligations as an eminent figure in the art world and the institutions to which he then belonged, forced him to make choices. He abandoned Orientalist painting to devote himself to portraiture and, to a lesser extent, to large decorative compositions, while still finding time for his successful paintings of young Italian women.

Notice written by Guy Saigne, whom we warmly thank here.