Louis-Emile Pinel de Grandchamp 

Biography of Louis-Emile Pinel de Grandchamp  ( 1831-1894 )

Louis-Emile Pinel de Grandchamp was born in Beaune in 1831. He began his painting studies at the École des Beaux-arts de Paris under Hippolyte Dubois, future director of the École des Beaux-arts d'Alger, before attending the classes of neoclassical painter François Édouard Picot. With these two masters, he acquired a solid technique that enabled him to exhibit two portraits at the Salon at just 18 years of age.

Eager to complete his artistic education, Pinel de Grandchamp decided to leave for Constantinople, as secretary to Sobi-Pacha, whose father was governor of Thessaly. In Constantinople, the young painter painted portraits of almost all the great dignitaries of the Ottoman Empire; he also gave lessons to the Armenian painter Zacharie Zacharian, who later settled in Paris.
During the Crimean War, which pitted the Russian Empire against the Ottoman Empire between 1853 and 1856, Pinel de Grandchamp went to Balaklava, the scene of a major confrontation in 1854. Pinel de Grandchamp worked on a reconstruction of the events, which he drew and sent to the leading French weekly L'Illustration. Back in Constantinople, he married the French musician Marie Viala, with whom he had three children, including two daughters who became painters, Marie and Virginie.

Between 1860 and 1865, Pinel de Grandchamp spent several months in Egypt and Tunis, where he painted many portraits of the Bey, who appointed him Officer of the Order of Nicham-Iftikar. In Egypt, he painted portraits of the viceroys Said and Ismail-Pacha. Stricken by a terrible attack of cholera, Pinel de Grandchamp decided to return to Paris in 1865, before settling in his native Beaune in 1884.

Back in France, the painter returned to the Salon des artistes français, where he exhibited his Orientalist paintings from 1866 to 1889. He also exhibited in Brussels and Antwerp, and was one of the representatives of French art at the Philadelphia World's Fair in 1876. The distribution of his works through reproductions published in various newspapers and magazines contributed to his international renown.