Delphin Enjolras Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Delphin Enjolras was a French Academic painter of portraits, nudes, and interiors. He is best known for his intimate portraits of young ladies performing ordinary activities for example reading or sewing, frequently lit up only by lamplight. Among his other works are scenes of domestic interiors, usually illuminated by a solitary lamp with warm, orange light. His most famous work is the Young Woman Reading by a Window.

A tragedy marked his childhood, his mother passed away at the age of 32, and his the father finds himself a widower with ten children. Disoriented, his father then leaves Coucouron to settle not far from there, in Langogne.

Delphin Enjolras first studied watercolor painting under Gaston Gerard at the Ecole de Dessin de la Ville de Paris, then moved on to the Ecole de Beaux-Arts to study oil painting with Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.

Delphin Enjolras started by painting landscapes in his early career, but what he wanted to paint were women. He changed genres, focusing on the portraiture of elegant young ladies bathed in soft light. He would become an excellent painter of nudes, and many of his later works, such as La Sieste (The Nap) are of a suggestive and erotic nature.

From 1890 and onward, Enjolras exhibited his oil paintings at the Paris Salon and joined the Société des Artistes Français in 1901.

Art Movement: Academic.
Artists Influencing Delphin Enjolras: Gaston Gérard, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pascal Bouveret.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.