HARPIGNIES, Henri-Joseph

French painter and printmaker. He came from a prosperous, solidly bourgeois background. A precocious draughtsman, he received elementary art training at the municipal school and became a talented cellist who enjoyed playing the chamber music of Haydn and Beethoven in later life. His artistic career was delayed by employment in the family iron forges at Denain and at the Famars sugar refinery, although he drew caricatures under the influence of the great French satirical lithographers.

In 1838 he was exposed to a wider variety of French landscape during a two-month tour with a family friend Dr Lachèze, who also introduced Harpignies to the landscape painter and etcher Jean-Alexis Achard (1807-84), with whom he studied in Paris in 1846. His first significant group of paintings and drawings in a marginally Realist style was made with his master at Crémieu in late 1847, but the Revolution of 1848 obliged him to return home. He then stayed with Achard in Brussels, producing his first sequence of etchings.

On Achard’s advice, he traveled in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, studying and painting as he went. His Italian sojourn was of considerable importance and he was to return there later in his career. His first Salon painting, show in 1853, was the View of Capri. In 1854, now back in France, he worked at Marly near the Forest of Fontainebleau where he returned often in subsequent years. He studied the works of the major Barbizon masters, who were then just becoming widely accepted and although he was never a pupil of Corot, he was deeply influenced by Corot’s compositional skills and colouring. He continued to travel widely in the manner of the first generation of French realist landscape painters.

In 1863 three of his four paintings were refused by an unusually draconian Salon Jury. Offended, he spent the next two years in Italy. He was vindicated in 1865 when the Emperor purchased one of his Salon paintings. In 1866 the State acquired two pictures and he was awarded a gold medal. Over the next fifty years, he participated in virtually every Salon, often sending watercolours as well as oil paintings; and he exhibited widely outside Paris as well. In addition to his gold medal in 1866, Harpignies received numerous further prizes including the grand prix award at the Exposition Universelle in 1900.