Jean-Jacques Henner (French, 1829–1905)
b. 1829 — d. 1905
The sixth and last child of Alsatian peasants, Jean-Jacques Henner became an extremely successful portraitist and painter of female nudes in Second Empire and Third Republic Paris. His oeuvre included religious pictures, landscapes, and still lifes as well. Henner received his first training from Charles Goutzwiller (1810-1900) in Altkirch, and in 1844 he went to Strasbourg to study under Gabriel Guérin (1790-1846) at his private academy. Upon Guérin's death Henner moved to Paris and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts as a student of Alsatian compatriot Michel-Martin Drolling (1786-1851). Drolling helped obtain a grant from the home region that made the young artist's continued Parisian training possible. When Drolling died Henner became a student of François-Édouard Picot (1786-1868). Henner's first known works are family portraits, which he continued to produce alongside the portrayals of notables commissioned later. Although he had won some medals in the early 1850s, Henner's failure to obtain the Prix de Rome in 1855 discouraged him and he returned home for two years. During this stay he visited Basel, where he saw Holbein's Dead Christ (1521, Öffentliche Kunstammlung, Basel), a continuing source of inspiration for Henner's religious pictures. Back in Paris, Henner achieved the Prix de Rome in 1858 with Adam and Eve Finding the Body of Abel (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris), which several critics considered one of the most original entries in the competition's history. During his subsequent five years in Italy, Henner was inspired by the landscapes of Rome and its environs, which he painted in a manner reminiscent of the early Corot (q.v.). He also discovered the Italian masters such as Titian (active 1508-1576) and Giorgione (1477-1510). The most significant influences on Henner's popular female nudes, however, were the works of Correggio (ca. 1489/94-1534), and those by the French artist Prud'hon (q.v.), whom he had admired earlier in Paris. Debuting at the Salon of 1863 with Young Bather Asleep (1862, Musée Unterlinden, Colmar) and two portraits, Henner won a third-class medal. He exhibited regularly for the next forty years and eventually won almost every award then available to artists. Henner painted his famous nudes with broad heavy strokes and used sfumato to soften their contours. Endowed with milky flesh and russet hair, they were consistently set against shadowy brown-toned landscapes. Favorite idyllic authors such as Virgil and Ovid inspired early examples, but after 1870 Henner began to move toward allegory and even symbolism, concentrating increasingly on the theme of death. Likewise, his earlier pictures' Italian settings were progressively replaced by Alsatian surroundings, prompted by nostalgia and by the 1871 loss of Alsace to Prussia, an event that affected Henner deeply. In 1903, two years before his death, Henner was named Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor.
