Ferdinand Humbert
French painter (1842-1934)
Jacques-Ferdinand Humbert (8 October 1842, in Paris – 6 October 1934, in Paris) was a French painter who specialized in portraits and historical scenes.
Life and work
His uncle, Jean Charles Ferdinand Humbert (1813–1881), was a famous landscape painter who had studied with Ingres. He received his education at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he enrolled in 1861. His teachers there included François-Édouard Picot, Alexandre Cabanel and Eugène Fromentin. His first showing at the Salon came in 1865, with a canvas depicting the "Flight of Nero". He received awards at subsequent Salons in 1866, 1867 and 1869.
In 1874, he began what would become his major life's work; "Pro Patria" (For the Homeland), a series of wall paintings at the Panthéon, which were completed in 1900. They comprised a cycle of the history of France and Paris, as well as a celebration of the Republic.
His fame extended outside France and he was especially well known among Parisians as a master of female portraiture. He served as a Professor at the École nationale until 1902, a few years after he opened his own art academy in the former studios of Fernand Cormon.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ferdinand Humbert” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.