Louis Laguerre

The Rape of Persephone ; Design by Laguerre for a wall painting in Devonshire House , London

Louis Laguerre (* 1663 in Versailles , † April 20, 1721 in London ) was a Baroque painter . He came from France, but he mainly worked in England, where he was one of the leading exponents of monumental decorative painting during the brief period in which Baroque ceiling and wall painting was modern there .

Life

Laguerre's father came from Catalonia and was the overseer of the royal menagerie in Versailles, where he was in high favor with King Louis XIV . His son was therefore trained at the Jesuit college in Paris. Laguerre's talent for drawing was discovered early on, which is why he was sent to the school of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and worked under Charles le Brun . At the end of 1683, however, he moved to England, where he worked as a pupil of Antonio Verrio on the painting of Burghley and Chatsworth House . In artistic quality, however, he soon surpassed Verrio, so that he himself soon became a leading exponent of monumental decorative painting in England. He painted murals and ceilings in Marlborough House and other London townhouses, as well as in numerous country estates such as Petworth House and Sudbury Hall . His masterpiece is the painting of the Blenheim Palace drawing room , which he painted from 1719 to 1720. In European comparison, however, his work is only mediocre. After 1710 he was surpassed by James Thornhill , so that he turned to portrait and history painting.

In his first marriage he was married to a daughter of the blacksmith Jean Tijou , who, like him , was busy with the expansion of Hampton Court Palace . His son was the singer and painter John Laguerre . In old age he fell ill with dropsy and died of a stroke in 1721 . He was buried in St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church.

literature

• The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-953294-0 , p. 339
• Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse: Painting in Britain, 1530 to 1790 . Yale University press, New Haven 1994. ISBN 0-300-05832-2 , pp. 126-127
• Lionel Henry Cust: Laguerre, Louis , in: Dictionary of National Biography . Volume XXXI . Macmillan, Smith, Elder & Co., London and New York 1892, p. 397

Web links

Commons : Louis Laguerre  - Collection of images, videos and audio files