LECOMTE, Hippolyte

French painter and lithographer. He was a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Regnault and Pierre-Antoine Mongin (1761-1827). He exhibited regularly at the Salon between 1804 and 1847 and received a first class medal as a genre painter in 1808. His reputation was based above all on his historical landscapes. Apart from a few contemporary subjects, his subjects were taken from an idealized view of the Middle Ages. He was one of the first landscape painters to turn to medieval history, but unlike most painters of historical landscape he emphasized the setting and tried to raise landscape to the level of history painting. However, he is best known for his ballet designs.

Lecomte’s wife, born Camille Vernet, was the sister of the painter Émile Jean-Horace Vernet; the caricaturist Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, better known as “J.J. Grandville”, worked in Lecomte’s studio. His son, Charles Emile Hippolyte Lecomte-Vernet, was also a noted painter.