Watercolor On Paper - Orientalist View Of Boats - By Ambroise Louis Garneray (1783 - 1857)

Watercolor on paper - Orientalist view of boats - By Ambroise Louis Garneray (1783 - 1857)

Visible at the Courcelles Antiquités Gallery, at 41 rue des Acacias, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris.

Born in 1783 and died in 1857, Ambroise Louis Garneray was a privateer, marine painter, draftsman, engraver and French writer, precursor of the maritime adventure novel. Eldest son of Jean-François Garneray (painter to the king and pupil of Jacques-Louis David), Ambroise Louis Garneray joined the navy as a pilot at the instigation of his cousin, Beaulieu-Leloup, captain of the frigate La Forte. His entire maritime career takes place mainly in the Indian Ocean. He began to paint after the War of 1814 when he found no employment in the commercial navy. Probably thanks to one of his brothers, himself a painter and engraver, he received his first official commission: the meeting of the Inconstant and the Zéphir. A year later, he exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon, he will be a regular at this Salon all the following years. Employed by the Duke of Angoulême, then Grand Admiral of France, he became his appointed painter by competition in 1817. Between 1821 and 1830, he traveled to many ports in France where he produced countless sketches which served as the basis for prints or canvases. In the 1830s, he developed a new painting process, aquatint, and also developed an important engraving activity. Garneray's pictorial work consists of 141 paintings, 176 engravings (mainly in wash or aquatint) and 22 watercolors. Part of his work is directly inspired by his adventurous life, the other comes within the framework of his function as a painter of the navy. In particular, he produced 64 views of French ports and 40 views of foreign ports (engravings), following voyages made in the 1820s.