Eugène Devéria (1805-1865) Portrait Of A Lady Of Quality With A Small Dog, Drawing

Eugène Devéria (1805-1865)
Portrait of a Lady of Quality with a Small Dog,
black chalk on paper,
38.8 x 30 cm.
Inscribed "Eugène Devéria" on the mounting strip in the base.
In fair condition, the paper shows some warping, particularly in the upper part.

Eugène Devéria, born in Paris on April 22, 1805, and died in Pau on February 3, 1865, was a Romantic and historical painter. Along with Eugène Delacroix and Louis Boulanger, he is one of the leading representatives of the French Romantic movement in painting. The Devéria family was a family of artists that included not only Achille and Eugène, but also Laure, the youngest, who showed real talent as a draftswoman and exhibited successfully at the Salon. She died prematurely in May 1838. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Devéria family's Parisian home attracted artists and musicians: "Romanticism was at home with the Devérias, as they used to say..." the poet Théophile Gautier, a close friend of Eugène's, would recall years later. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Girodet-Trioson and Guillaume Guillon Lethière. The young painter received numerous official commissions: a painting for the ceiling of a room in the Louvre, entitled "Puget Presenting His Milo of Croton to Louis XIV," and portraits of historical figures for the Museum of the History of France that Louis-Philippe wished to create in Versailles. He participated in the decoration of the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette church in Paris. In 1838, he accepted the offer to leave the capital for Avignon, where he was commissioned to redo all the painted decoration of the Notre-Dame-des-Doms Cathedral. The scale of the task, the unsanitary conditions, and a terrible flood in which he and his family nearly perished exhausted the painter, who, ill and weakened, left the papal city to recuperate in Béarn. In 1841, fully recovered, he settled permanently in Pau, where he remained until his death.