François Marius Granet

b. 1775 — d. 1849

Son of a master mason, Granet received early artistic training from J.-A. Constantin (1756-1844) at the free drawing academy in Aix. A fellow pupil was the highborn Auguste de Forbin (1777-1841), who became his most important friend and patron. In 1793 Granet participated in the siege of Toulon, where he met Bonaparte and worked as a draftsman with the artillery battery. Three years later he made his first visit to Paris, where he admired and copied Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Louvre. In 1798 Granet returned to Paris to join Forbin in the atelier of David (q.v.), but he had to leave after a few months from lack of funds. The next year, however, he showed at the Salon; his successful Little Cloister of the Feuillants (untraced), a Parisian monastery interior, announced the dominant theme of his subsequent work, which owed more to his study of seventeenth-century northern masters than it did to the brief stay in David's studio. In 1802 Granet and Forbin went to Rome, where Granet remained generally for the next twenty-two years, making a living during the first years by selling views of ancient monuments. His internationally acclaimed Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome (possibly the work dated 1815 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), of which the Cleveland painting is a late variant, sealed the artist's success. In 1819 Granet was named knight of the Legion of Honor and in 1822 knight of the Order of St. Michael. His precisely painted pictures appealed through their dramatic chiaroscuro and masterful articulation of architectural forms. In the Italian and French countryside Granet also created many fluid oil and watercolor landscape sketches, whose simplified forms and subtle light effects prefigured the art of Corot (q.v.). By the end of the 1830s the vogue for Granet's quietly religious paintings waned. In the meantime he had begun an important career as a museum official. Having left Rome in 1824 to accept a position offered by Forbin, Granet became chief curator at the Louvre in 1826 and then curator of Louis-Philippe's new Musée Historique de Versailles in 1833. He was also named, in 1844, honorary director of the museum in his hometown of Aix. His long-time friend Forbin died in 1841, and in 1843 Granet married the recently widowed Marie-Madeleine Appoloni ("Nena"), whom he had known since the early days in Rome. Upon her death in 1847 Granet went to his country residence in Aix, where he remained after the revolution of 1848. The next year's bequeathal of studio and collection to the Aix museum constitutes a rare example of the preservation of an artists's atelier at the time.