Charles Auguste Durand

Portrait of Carolus-Duran (1879) by John Singer Sargent

Carolus-Duran was the name adopted by the French painter Charles Auguste Émile Durand (July 4, 1837 - 1917), who was born at Lille.

He studied at the Lille Academy and then at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in 1861 to Italy and Spain for further study, especially devoting himself to the pictures of Velázquez. His subject picture Murdered, or The Assassination (1866), was one of his first successes, and is now in the Lille museum, but he became best known afterwards as a portrait painter, and as the head of one of the principal ateliers in Paris, where some of the most brilliant artists of a later generation were his pupils. He took part in 1890 in the creation of the National Society of French Art (Société Nationale des Beaux Arts). His Lady with the Glove (1869), a portrait of his own wife, was bought for the Luxembourg Museum in Paris. In 1889 he was made a commander of the Legion of Honour. He became a member of the Académie des Beaux-arts in 1904, and in the next year was appointed director of the French academy at Rome in succession to Eugène Guillaume.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.