Louis René Vialy
French painter (1680-1770)

Louis-René Vialy (1680 – 17 February 1770), also spelled Vially, Viali or Viallis, was a French painter.
Life
The son of Jacques Vialy, a Sicilian painter born at Trapani but who moved to Provence, Louis-René Vialy was born at Aix-en-Provence. He began his career decorating sedan chairs, as attested by Mariette, who wrote that "it was a very popular taste in Provence to have ornamented sedan chairs". His father was naturalised as a French subject by letters registered at the cour des comptes of Aix-en-Provence in 1720 and died in Aix on 25 December 1745 aged 95. He was buried the following day in the old parish church of La Madeleine, beside Jean-Baptiste van Loo who had died on 29 September the same year.
Louis-René at first studied under his father and very often attended the Vernets' studio – Antoine Vernet, decorative painter, was a family friend of Louis's father. Louis-René is normally named as the tutor of the young marine painter Joseph Vernet but this was actually Jacques. Louis-René in 1752 painted a pastel portrait of Vernet and owned several paintings by him, such as the two exhibited at the Salon of 1757. Mariette also cites him as tutor to the engraver Jean-Joseph Balechou.
Vialy seems to have set himself up in Paris around 1750, in rue d’Argenteuil, behind the Church of Saint-Roch.
“Louis René Vialy” enters the record as french painter (1680-1770). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Louis, René and Vialy can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Louis René Vialy” 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.