Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, French   1836 - 1911

Jules Lefebvre was known in his time as the champion of the elegant and exquisite nude and a devotee of the traditional cult of beauty.  Born in Tournan, France, little evidence was given of the brilliant career to come.  His father was a baker and it was to this trade that he was initially apprenticed.

At the age of sixteen, after showing a wonderful aptitude for drawing and over his mother's objections, his father sent him to Paris to be educated as an artist.  There Lefebvre became the pupil of Leon Cogniet and in 1855 made his debut at the World's Exposition in Paris with a portrait.

Carrying off the Grand Prize for the Prix de Rome in 1861, the artist went on to receive all the honors that France could possibly bestow upon its artists.  Lefebvre received medals at the annual Paris Salons of 1865, 1868 and 1870, and a First Class medal at the 1878 Exposition Universelle.  He was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1870 and that same year was appointed a Professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.  

As his studies were always of a chaste, austere and classic character, it was perhaps aptly said that he saw "beauty through a veil of perfection."  One reviewer wrote in 1881: "…it is sufficient to just mention his name in order to immediately evoke the memory and the image of the thousand adorable creatures of which he is the young father...  An unusually skilled draftsman, Jules Lefebvre better than anyone else caresses, with a brush both delicate and sure, the undulating contour of the feminine form."

Biography excerpted from the unpublished catalog by Edward P. Bentley for the Haussner Restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland, titled: Haussner's, The Art Collection.