Achille DevÉria (1800-1857): Invention Of The Vaccine Or Immunization Celebrated By Devéria Around1830

Achille DEVÉRIA (1800-1857): Invention of the vaccine or immunization celebrated by Devéria around1830 "RARE and topical !!! (The history of modern vaccines began in 1796 when Dr. Edward Jenner vaccinated James Phipps, then 8 years old years with the smallpox of the cow (vaccine) to protect it from the smallpox.) Engraving, enhanced with varnish, signed lower right in the plate, 24 x 19 cm. The margins are not visible because the master key is fixed above. Note that Devéria gave his doctor, the features of Napoleon! Jacques Jean-Marie Achille Devéria is a French painter, illustrator and engraver of the romantic era, born February 6, 1800 in Paris and died December 23 1857 in this city Biography Achille Devéria is the son of an official of the Navy, and the eldest of five siblings. He first follows the painting lessons of Anne-Louis Girodet1 then those of Louis Lafitte, designer to the king. In 1822, when he began to exhibit at the Salon, he and his Brother Eugène (also a painter) opened a drawing course. Achille Devéria made the acquaintance of Victor Hugo and his wife one evening in December 1824 while awaiting the opening of the counters in the galleries of the Odeon theater where, since the 7th of the month, the Robin des Bois opera or the Three balls, a very free French adaptation of Weber2's Freischütz. A drawing promised during this meeting and brought to Madame Hugo marks the beginning of their regular exchanges and the visits that they now make mutually to their respective homesN 1. Achille Devéria marries, in 1829, Céleste Motte, daughter of the printer lithographer Charles Motte (1785-1836). According to their son Gabriel, “the house [his] father owned in rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was hidden away in gardens: it had the tranquility of a retreat and the gaiety of a nest3. This house had two entrances. The second, more readily indicated as the official address in the exhibition catalogs, was at no.38 of the old rue de l'Ouest4 (Luxembourg district, former 11th arrondissement) which, at that time, ran alongside the nursery planted in the location of the old Carthusian enclosure. The house is both the family home where Eugène and Laure Devéria also live, and Achille's workplace, who sets up his workshop there. It is “cheerful and animated by the movement [of] six children” of the couple who receive in their living room “all the romantic pleiad5. »Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas (father), Prosper Mérimée, Franz Liszt and many other artists and writers come to his studio to be immortalized. A portrait of Honoré de Balzac young man (1825) is attributed to him4. Alfred de Musset declaimed his first verses there. Achilles exercised his art in various genres. We owe him religious paintings and highly sought after watercolors. He is the first who knew how to apply color to lithography, with the help of Motte who made the prints. In 1830, Devéria was a recognized illustrator who published numerous lithographs1 (for example the frontispiece of Goethe's Faust). He also executed erotic paintings and engravings1. During the Salon of 1846, his work was noticed by critics. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Here is a beautiful name, here is a noble and true artist in our opinion6. In 1849, Devéria was appointed director of the Prints department of the National Library1 and deputy curator of the Egyptian department of the Louvre. He spent his last years traveling in Egypt, drawing and transcribing inscriptions. Achille Devéria family is the brother of Eugène Devéria (1805-1865), also a painter, and of Laure Devéria (1813-1838), a painter of flowers who died prematurely. By his marriage to Céleste Motte, concluded in 1829, he was the son-in-law of the lithographer printer Charles Motte. Public collections San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts J. Paul Getty Museum9 Louvre Museum Beaune Fine Arts Museum: Odalisque, oil on canvas Alexandre Vassiliev Foundation Norton Simon Museum Collections of the University of Liège University of Wake Forest10 Gray, Baron-Martin museum: Death of Mlle Mayer, after Prud'hon, engraving on paper, 16 x 13 cm; Nymph with the dog or Naiad with the dog, after Prud'hon, etching on paper, 21 x 29 cm. (Wikipedia)