Georges Michel (French, 1763–1843)

b. 1763 — d. 1843

Born in Paris in 1763, Georges Michel was a child of romanticism (Jean-Jacques Rousseau died in 1778). Even before Paul Huet (1803-1869), Decamps (q.v.), Daumier (q.v.), and all the other painters who formed the first generation of the School of Barbizon, Michel was the first to tackle the representation of nature free of aesthetic prejudices and unencumbered by pre-established rules learned in the workshop of some prestigious teacher. Of humble origin, Michel was very precocious not only in the apprenticeship of his craft but in his private life as well. Twelve years old when he entered the workshop of a professor of the Academy of Saint Luke, Michel often played truant to go and draw after nature in the Saint Denis plain. Married when he was sixteen, he was already the father of five children by the time he was twenty. After spending some time traveling in Switzerland and in Germany, he returned to Paris, where he met the Baron d'Ivry, an art lover who provided him with financial support, as he later did for Decamps. Around 1790 Michel met painter Lazare Bruandet (1755-1804), who was already working in the open air in the forest of Fontainebleau and who became a close friend. Their meeting would have important consequences for Michel's artistic evolution. Around 1800, the painter and art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun (1748-1813) commissioned him to reproduce landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-1689), Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709), Rembrandt (1606-1669), as well as by several other Dutch painters. Vivant Denon, then director of the Louvre, called upon him to participate in the restoration of the Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Louvre's collection. Michel's work was greatly influenced by this close contact with the Old Masters at a time when the majority of the painters of his generation, artists like Xavier Bidauld (1758-1846), Bertin (q.v.), Nicolas Antoine Taunay (1755-1830), etc., were drawn to Italy. Michel never ventured further than the immediate surroundings of Paris. He once said that "the person who is incapable of painting all his life within four leagues of space has no imagination, and in his search for a mandrake, will only find emptiness."1 1. Sensier 1873, 21.