Evariste Vital Luminais Biography | Oil Paintings

Aware of Évariste Vital Luminais natural artistic talent, his family sent him to Paris when he was eighteen to study with the painter and sculptor Auguste Debay. He also studied with the historical and portrait painter Léon Cogniet,  whose pupils included Léon Bonnat, and Constant Troyon, who painted landscapes and animals.

Évariste Vital Luminais made his debut at the 1843 Paris Salon, exhibiting two oil paintings. He won medals at the Salons in 1852, 1855, 1857, 1861, and 1889, when he won the gold medal. In 1869, he was awarded the Légion d'Honneur and was a founder member of the Société des Artistes Français. For more than forty years, he divided his time between his Paris studio and his summer house and studio in the village of Douadic.

Évariste Vital Luminais worked in the genre and historical modes. He was among the academic painters who satisfied a social interest for glorifying, even propagandist historical works in the early years of the Third Republic, after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In some paintings, such as The Widow he foreshadows social realism, he also used a historical dressing to make hunting and peasant scenes more tasteful for the Academy.

Luminais played an important part in disseminating the iconography of the Gauls; their popular image, with long hair and winged helmets, was developed by historians at this time as part of an examination of French history. He also depicted the Franks, unusual for historical painters of the time, whose contribution to French history was then underrated in favor of the Gauls. His painting of The Germans Routed After The Battle Of Tolbiac and Frankish Cavalry in Combat was inspired by reading Chateaubriand.

In 1880 Évariste Vital Luminais painted, The Sons of Clovis II, also called Les Énervés de Jumièges, his most famous Merovingian painting based on a legend concerning the seventh-century Merovingian king Clovis II, after rebelling against their father, the two princes are punished according to their mother's suggestion through the destruction of the tendons of their muscles "enervation", and were then set adrift on a raft in the River Seine, they were rescued by the monks of the Abbey of Jumièges and later reconciled with their parents.

Artists Influencing Évariste Luminais: Auguste Debay, Léon Cogniet.
Painters Évariste Vital Luminais Influenced: Albert Maignan, Emily Sartain.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.