Ary Scheffer Biography | Oil Paintings

Ary Scheffer was initially taught by his father and at age eleven, attended the Teeken-Academie in Amsterdam from 1806 to 1809. Encouraged by Willem Bilderdijk, he moved to Lille on the French border. In 1811 he and his mother, who had a large influence on his career, moved to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts first with Pierre-Paul Prud’hon and then as a pupil of the Neoclassical painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.

When Ary Scheffer left Guérin's studio, Romanticism had come into vogue in France, with such painters as Xavier Sigalon, Eugène Delacroix, and Théodore Géricault. Scheffer did not show much affinity with their work and developed his own style, which has been called "frigidly classical".

Ary Scheffer started exhibiting at the Paris Salon from 1812 at the age of seventeen onward. He started to become recognized in 1817 and 1819 he was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, because of Lafayette's many political contacts, Scheffer was politically active throughout his life and he also became a prominent Philhellene, an admirer of Greeks and everything Greek. Scheffer spent his career in Paris and became one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement after abandoning his early Neoclassical style.

As a Captain of the Garde Nationale, Ary Scheffer escorted the royal family in their escape from the Tuileries and escorted Duchess d'Orléans to the Chambre des Députés where she proposed in vain, for her son to be made the next monarch of France. Scheffer fought in the army of Cavaignac during the popular uprising in Paris, but he was so shocked by the cold-bloodiness against and contempt for the lower classes from the government's side that he withdrew from political activity and refused to make portraits of the family of Napoléon III. After 1846, he ceased to exhibit and was made a commander of the Legion of Honour in 1848, before the new government came into power. His strong ties with the royal family caused him to fall out of favor when the Second Republic came into being in 1848. He stayed in his studio and produced many paintings, but no one saw them, nor were they exhibited until after his death in 1858.

One of the smaller paintings version of his Christus Consolator (the bigger painting is at the Van Gogh-Museum in Amsterdam), was lost for over seventy years, was discovered in a janitor's closet in the Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Dassel, Minnesota in 2007. It has been restored and is on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Art Movement: Romanticism.
Artists Influencing Ary Scheffer: Johan Bernard Scheffer, Cornelia Lamme, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.
He Traveled To Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, England.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.