Antoine Berjon: 4 interesting facts

Antoine Berjon (17 May 1754 – 24 October 1843) was a French painter and designer, among the most important flower painters of 19th-century France. He worked in a variety of media including oil, pastel, watercolour, and ink.

Berjon was born in St Pierre de Vaise, a commune of Lyon, to the son of a butcher, and he first studied drawing following the local sculptor Antoine-Michel Perrache (1726–1779). His in advance history is not clear; according to his uncorroborated biographer J. Gaubin, he may have studied medicine or a religious vocation, learning flower painting during his novitiate. He went to act out as a designer of textiles in Lyon’s important silk industry until its collapse taking into consideration the French Revolution.

Berjon’s paintings from the 1780s are untraced. In 1791, the Paris Salon all the rage four of his works, including Still Life of Peaches and Grapes. He visited Paris often in the upfront 1790s and moved there in 1794, becoming a buddy of Jean-Baptiste-Jean Augustin (1759–1832), a painter of miniatures, and of Claude-Jean-Baptiste Hoin (1750–1817), a portraitist. Living in Paris for 17 years, he exhibited at the Salon at least five times.

By the era of his compensation to Lyon in 1810, his reputation had increased, and he became the professor of flower design at the newly established École des Beaux-Arts, which had been founded by Napoleon’s doing in 1807 to revive Lyon’s silk industry. He was dismissed in 1823 after a 13-year appointment, replaced by his talented pupil Augustin Thierrat (1789–1870). His temperament probably put him in dogfight with the school’s administration; he was known for his stubbornness, and some contemporaries viewed him as egotistical, a characterization that remained throughout his life. He set in the works his own studio in Lyon, giving private instruction, and continued to make art for the last two decades of his life. He died in Lyon at 89.