Jean-Paul Laurens is remembered for work the next generation could not ignore.
The record lists Jean-Paul Laurens as French painter (1838-1921).
Jean-Paul Laurens was born at Fourquevaux in 1838. His recorded nationality is France. He trained at Beaux-Arts de Paris.
The nineteenth century broke the academy's authority: independent exhibitions, dealers and the beginnings of modernism.
He worked as painter, sculptor and illustrator.
His recorded movement is academic art.
Among his best-known works are The Excommunication of Robert the Pious, The Suicide of Cato the Younger and Saint John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia. A painting outlives the argument about it, which is the only durable form of an artistic reputation.
Recognition followed: Jean Reynaud Prize (1912) and Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour (1919).
That the work was made in France shaped it: artistic traditions, academies and the galleries that decide what is seen have never been evenly distributed.
Jean-Paul Laurens died in 1921, aged 83. The work remains, hanging in collections that outlived both the artist and the market that first priced it.
Achievements
- Jean Reynaud Prize — 1912
- Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1919
- Notable work: The Excommunication of Robert the Pious
- Notable work: The Suicide of Cato the Younger
- Notable work: Saint John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia
- Notable work: The Death of Tiberius
- Movement: academic art
