Achille Devéria  

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Achille Jacques-Jean-Marie Devéria (6 February 1800 – 23 December 1857) was a French painter and lithographer. His father was a civil employee of the navy and student of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson and Louis Lafitte (1770–1828). He is now best-known for his risque drawings. His paintings were mainly done using watercolours. The French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire referred to his portrait series as showing "all the morals and aesthetics of the age".

Contents

Career

In 1822, he began exhibiting at the Paris Salon. At some point, he opened an art school together with his brother Eugène, who was also a painter.

Illustration work

By 1830 Devéria had become a successful illustrator and had published a many lithographs in form of notebooks and albums (e.g. his illustrations to Goethe's Faust, 1828) and romantic novels. He also produced many engravings of libertine contents.

His experience in the art of the vignette and maniere noire (dark manner) influenced his numerous lithographs, most of which were issued by his father-in-law, Charles-Etienne Motte (17851836).

Themes

Most of his work consisted of "pseudo-historical, pious, sentimental or erotic scenes." (Wright) Since he rarely depicted tragic or grave themes, he appears less Romantic than many other artists of the time.

Portraits

Devéria was also known for doing portraits of artists and writers, whom he entertained in his Paris studio on Rue de l'Ouest. The list of his sitters includes Alexandre Dumas, père, Prosper Mérimée, Sir Walter Scott, David, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, Gericault, Victor Hugo, Marie Dorval, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny and Franz Liszt.

Director of the Bibliothèque Nationale

In 1849, Devéria was appointed director of the Bibliothèque Nationale's department of engravings and assistant curator of the Louvre's Egyptian department.

Final days

In the following years, he taught drawing and lithography to his son, Théodule Devéria, and both worked on a family portrait album from 1853 until Devéria's death. They applied ink wash to several of the portraits in the album, possibly in preparation for printing lithographs from the photographs. The album photographs by Théodule Devéria are dated 1854.

Devéria spent his last days traveling in Egypt making drawings and transcribing texts. He died in 1857 of a "chest malady."

Collections

Works by Devéria are in the Louvre Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Norton Simon Museum, and the Université de Liège collections.

Ouvrages classiques illustrés par Achille Devéria

La liste n'est pas exhaustive.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Achille Devéria" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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