Jules-Élie Delaunay

Jules-Élie Delaunay (Jun 13, 1828 - Sep 5, 1891) was a French academic painter.

He was born at Nantes in the Loire-Atlantique département of France. Delaunay studied under Flandrin, and at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris under Lamothe.

Jules-Élie Delaunay entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1848, where he was a pupil of Hippolyte Flandrin and Louis Lamothe.

He worked in the classicist manner of Ingres until, after winning the Prix de Rome, he went to Italy; in 1856, and abandoned the ideal of Raphaelesque perfection for the sincerity and severity of the quattrocentists.with Henri-Pierre Picou, he stayed four years at the Villa Medici.

On his return to Paris, he specialized in major compositions and received important orders from the Church or the State. His works can be admired at the Opéra Garnier, in the staircase of honor of the Hotel de Ville in Paris and in the nave of the Pantheon (Paris) where are the signs representing Saint Genevieve and Attila. He puts so much application into the realization of this last command that after fifteen years the work is still not finished.

After his return from Rome he was entrusted with many important commissions for decorative paintings, such as the frescoes in the church of St Nicholas at Nantes; the three panels of Apollo, Orpheus and Amphion at the Paris Opera house; and twelve paintings for the great hall of the council of state in the Palais Royal.

His Scenes from the Life of St Genevieve, which he designed for the Panthéon, remained unfinished at his death. The Musée d'Orsay has his famous Plague in Rome and a nude figure of Diana; and the Nantes Museum, the Lesson on the Flute. In the last decade of his life he achieved great popularity as a portrait painter.

Delaunay was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1879 and became a studio head at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1889. A friend of the wealthy and academic Ernest Legouvé, Delaunay is responsible for education Artistic work of his grandson George Desvallières, the future painter. Together they visited Ticino in 1884. Later Delaunay introduced Gustave Moreau. This last and Delaunay are the witnesses of the marriage of George Desvallières and Marguerite Lefebvre in 1890.

Jules-Élie Delaunay died in Paris in 1891.
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