Louis Janmot Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

In 1831 Louis Janmot entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and a year later at age eighteen, he won its highest honor, the Golden Laurel. In 1833, he traveled to Paris to further study painting with Victor Orsel and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In 1835, he went to Rome with some students and there he met and studied with Hippolyte Flandrin.

After his return to Lyon in 1836, Louis Janmot sent two paintings to Paris and gained the attention of art critics of the Salon with his religious inspired large-scale paintings as The Resurrection of the Son of the Widow of Nain and Christ in Gethsemane. After 1845, he attracted the interest of Charles Baudelaire with his painting Flower of the Fields that gained him to access to the 1846 Salon.

Louis Janmot moved to Paris in 1861 in the wake of having been guaranteed a commission for the Church of St. Augustine, but this project was abandoned three years later and while waiting for it, he experiencing significant family and financial problems, so he gave up and accepted a professorship at the Dominican School of Arcueil.

After the birth of her seventh child in 1870, his wife died in their new home in Bagneux. During the Franco-Prussian War, while the Prussian troops approached and occupied his house, he fled to Algiers with his stepfather and his children. His house had been looted and partially destroyed so instead he returned in the following year in Paris and led a solitary life.

Louis Janmot most critical works, a group of 18 oil paintings with verse, called Poem of the Soul, occupied him for 40 years. Confronted with family and financial problems, Janmot went to Toulon, and despite some commissions, he lived a retired life. Janmot has been seen as a transitional figure between Romanticism and Symbolism, prefiguring the French part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Art Movement: Symbolism.
Artists Influencing Louis Janmot: Victor Orsel, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
He Traveled To Italy, Algeria.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.