Achille Etna Michallon

Bio

Achille Michallon, the son of the sculptor Claude Michallon (1751-1799), who had won the prix de Rome in 1785, grew up in the Louvre where his parents had an apartment adjacent to his father’s studio. At the age of six, while the Louvre was being renovated, they moved to artist’s lodgings in the Sorbonne. Already exhibiting a precocious talent, Michallon first entered the studio of David, where he studied the art of drawing the human form, before joining that of Valenciennes. Under the latter’s tutelage he developed his interest in landscapes and took instruction from two of Valenciennes’ followers, Dunouy and Bertin. In 1812, at the age of fifteen Michallon exhibited for the first time at the Salon, receiving a second prize gold medal – an astonishing achievement that excited much comment at the time.

With such critical attention at an early age it is hardly surprising that Michallon attracted the patronage of the enormously wealthy Prince Yussoupoff (who returned to Russia in 1814), then of the Duchess of Berry, daughter-in-law of the future King Charles X, as well as the Count de L’Espine,[1] the finance master of Louis XVIII. In 1817 he exhibited two major works at the Salon, our painting and A Landscape with Democritus and the Alberitons, for which he received the newly founded prix de Rome for historical landscape (paysage historique), founded to honour his former teacher Valenciennes. It was hoped that the institution of this prize would confer on landscape painting a similar prestige to that it had long bestowed on history subjects. As one contemporary art historian wrote, ‘the young artist who devotes himself to a career of landscape painting will not attract the attention of such generous patronage without exerting himself to meet the expectations of an august protector or fully achieving the hopes of the nation …. Historical landscape is henceforth called to contribute, along with the high forms of the arts, to the maintenance of the supremacy of the French School and to the realization of its brilliant future’.[2]

Michallon re-energized the art of landscape painting, avoiding the repetitiveness of Dunouy, Bidauld and Bertin, and soon established his own circle of admiring artists, of whom the most eminent was the young Camille Corot. Michallon introduced into this genre a hint of the romanticism that was to dominate the succeeding two decades, while ‘the nobility of figures who populate the pictures and elevation of ideas … combine to give life to a subject capable of moving the soul or exalting the imagination…’. [3] His larger, most ambitious landscapes manifested the sense of drama and grandeur found in the work of Poussin, which was to become even more apparent in his works produced in Rome between 1817 and 1821. Michallon died before his talent was fully realized at the age of twenty-six, leaving only a modest output of finished works and a number of brilliant sketches, small studies and drawings.

[1] Whose granddaughter, Hortense, Princess Louis de Cröy, bequeathed his collection including the Valenciennes oil sketches, to the Louvre.

[1] J. B. Deperthes, Histoire de l’art du paysage depuis la Renaissance des beaux-arts jusqu’au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Le Normant, 1822). Quoted in Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy, New Haven and London, 1991, p. 59, note 67.

[1] J. B. Deperthes, Théorie du paysage ou considérations sur les beautés de la nature que l’art peut imiter, et sur les moyens qu’il doit employer pour réussir dans cette imitation (Paris: LeNormant, 1818), in Galassi, Op. cit., 1991, p. 57, note 68.