Etienne aubry artist biography
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Biography
French painter. He trained under Jacques-Augustin Silvestre (1719-1809) and Joseph Marie Vien, exhibiting portraits at the Salon from 1771 and becoming a member of the Académie Royale as a portrait painter in 1775. His portraits of such eminent contemporaries as the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (Musée du Louvre, Paris) are characterized by a quiet, understated elegance.
In 1775, ambitious to improve his status as an artist within the hierarchy of genres, he began to exhibit scenes of domestic life. Paternal Love (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham) is indebted to the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, but the sentimental subject is depicted with a compositional clarity and restrained naturalism that make Aubry the most original and appealing of Greuze's imitators. The Nurse's Farewell (The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown) departs from prototypes by Greuze in its representation of a fashionable urban family in a landscape setting. In the late 1770s Aubr
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Etienne AUBRY
Versailles 1745 - Versailles 1781
Biography
One of the most interesting and talented painters working in France in the latter half of the 18th century, Etienne Aubry began his artistic training with Jacques Augustin de Silvestre, maître a dessiner des enfants de France, and later studied with Joseph Marie Vien. In the early years of his career, Aubry worked almost exclusively as a portrait painter, and as such was agréé at the Academie Royale in 1771. He made his debut at the Salon the same year, exhibiting four portraits. His work as a portraitist gradually gave way to an interest in genre painting in the moralizing manner of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, resulting in such works as the Paternal Love in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham. In fact, after exhibiting only portraits at the Salons of 1771 and 1773, in 1775 he submitted just one portrait, together with a number of genre scenes, and in 1777 and 1779 showed no portraits at all. Late in his career,
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Étienne Aubry
Palace of Versailles
Palace of Versailles
Palace of Versailles
Barber Institute of Fine Arts
Detroit Institute of Arts
Clark Art Institute