Christophe Guérin

Christophe Guérin (* 1758 in Strasbourg , † 1831 in Strasbourg) was a French draftsman and engraver.

Life

Art was in the family of Christophe Guérin: his father Jean Guérin (1724–1787) was a copperplate engraver, his brother Jean Urbain Guérin (1760–1836) a miniature painter and his son Gabriel-Christophe Guérin (1790–1846) a painter.

Christophe Guérin was educated at an art school, the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris ; one of his teachers there is said to have been Nicolas-René Jollain (1732-1804).

Illustration for a book by Jacques Delille . The theme of the picture is humanity: mother and daughter, of good standing, visit a poor family to give them presents

The portrait of Saint-Just; the choice of the profile line to the right suggests that Guérin was left-handed

After that he worked all his life in his hometown Strasbourg. There he was an engraver in the mint, illustrated books, for which he also engraved many portraits, such as one of the Strasbourg organ builder Johann Andreas Silbermann (1712–1783) in 1780 , or another of the musician Franz in 1785 Xaver Richter (1709–1789). Christophe Guérin also worked as an engraver on the Swiss atlas , created between 1786 and 1802, by the Franco-German cartographer Johann Heinrich Weiss (1759-1826) and the Swiss entrepreneur Johann Rudolf Meyer (1739-1813).

In the autumn of 1793 Guérin met the People's Representative Louis Antoine de Saint-Just , who was inspecting the Rhine Army at the time and had come to Strasbourg, and made a portrait ( en profile ) of him, a red chalk drawing that is now in the Museum Carnavalet in Paris is located.

When, triggered by the French Revolution , the school system was restructured everywhere in France, the École Centrale du Department du Bas-Rhin ("Central School of the Lower Rhine Department") was established in Strasbourg in 1795 . Here Christophe Guérin was appointed teacher and head of the École gratuierte de Dessin , the drawing school in this new facility. His lessons soon enjoyed great popularity; up to 130 students are said to have been in it at times; including the later famous Franco-German painter Benjamin Zix .

In 1802 Christophe Guérin got another job when he was appointed curator of the nascent Musée de Beaux-Art de Strasbourg (Museum of Art History of Strasbourg) by the prefect . Guérin then worked on building up and maintaining the museum collection until his death, after which the work was continued by his son, Gabriel-Christophe Guérin.

literature

Emmanuell Bénézit: Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays… Gründ, Paris 1976.
Georg Kaspar Nagler : New general artist lexicon or news of the life and works of painters, sculptors, builders, copper engravers, shape cutters, lithographers, draftsmen, medalists, ivory workers, etc. Fleischmann, Munich 1837.
Charles Gabet: Dictionnaire des artistes de l'école française, au XIXe siècle: peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure, dessin, lithographie et composition musisicale. Vergne, Paris 1834.
Tessa Friedericke Rosebrock: Kurt Martin and the Musée des Baux-Arts de Strasbourg: Museum and exhibition policy in the 'Third Reich' and in the immediate post-war period. Academy, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-05-005189-5 .
Tanja Baensch: “Un petit Berlin”? The re-establishment of the Strasbourg painting collection by Wilhelm Bode . V&R unipress, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89971-380-0 .

Web links

Commons : Christophe Guérin - Collection of Images

Literature by and about Christophe Guérin in the bibliographic database WorldCat
Index entry for Christophe Guérin in the database of the German biography
Christophe Guérin in Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (4th edition)
Pictures by Guérin in the British Museum

Remarks

↑ Some sources also state 1830 as the year of death.
↑ Other engravers on this project were Matthias Gottfried Eichler (1748–1821) and Samuel Johann Jakob Scheurmann (1771–1844).
↑ The election of an artist to head a museum was the rule for provincial museums in France at this time.
^ At that time, together with Strasbourg, the first public museums were set up in fourteen other cities in France. The reason for this was that the museum premises in Paris were overcrowded with works of art due to the move in of ecclesiastical and aristocratic property during the revolution and urgently had to be relieved in order to reduce the conservation responsibility in the capital and, to a certain extent, over the whole To distribute land.

personal data
SURNAME	Guérin, Christophe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Guérin, Christoph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French draftsman and engraver
DATE OF BIRTH	1758
PLACE OF BIRTH	Strasbourg
DATE OF DEATH	1831
Place of death	Strasbourg

[1] Some sources also state 1830 as the year of death.

[2] Other engravers on this project were Matthias Gottfried Eichler (1748–1821) and Samuel Johann Jakob Scheurmann (1771–1844).

[3] The election of an artist to head a museum was the rule for provincial museums in France at this time.

[4] At that time, together with Strasbourg, the first public museums were set up in fourteen other cities in France. The reason for this was that the museum premises in Paris were overcrowded with works of art due to the move in of ecclesiastical and aristocratic property during the revolution and urgently had to be relieved in order to reduce the conservation responsibility in the capital and, to a certain extent, over the whole To distribute land.