Louis Martinet

Louis Martinet (* 1814 ; † 1895 ) was a French history painter , gallery owner and theater director.

Life

The pupil of Antoine-Jean Gros had to give up his career as a painter due to an eye problem and in 1849 joined l'administration des beaux-arts as an inspector , for which he organized exhibitions between 1850 and 1855. In 1857 he resigned from his functions. He became a member of the caisse de secours des artistes founded by the merchant and art lover Francis Petit in 1859 , for which he organized a retrospective by Ary Scheffer .

The exhibition took place in a gallery on the Boulevard des Italiens, which Martinet remained connected to for the next ten years. In 1860 he exhibited 25 paintings by Jean Siméon Chardin here. In 1861 he became director of the gallery, which, in addition to classical painting, was primarily dedicated to contemporary French painters who found no place in the art world of the Second Empire ( refusés ).

In addition to works by Rembrandt , Ruysdael , Ribera , Ingres and Velázquez , he showed pictures by Jean-François Millet , Jules Dupré , Théodore Rousseau , James McNeill Whistler , Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Édouard Manet . Since 1861 he published the Courrier Artistique , a magazine for contemporary art.

As a vehement advocate of copyright law, he founded the Société nationale des beaux-arts with two hundred painters and sculptors in 1862 , which was supposed to ensure the marketing of their own works and financial independence for the participating artists (and from which the Société des artistes francais emerged in 1888 ). Over time, Martinet expanded the activities of his gallery, which held concerts with works by Hector Berlioz , Félicien David , Georges Bizet and Camille Saint-Saëns, and readings by Alexandre Dumas and Théophile Gautier , who ran the Société nationale des beaux-arts took over.

After the Société nationale des beaux-arts had failed in 1865 due to market pressure and the distrust of the French government, Martinet converted his gallery into the Théâtre des Fantaisies-Parisiennes , which Jules Champfleury took over. Martinet began a successful career as a theater director that eventually led him to the head of the Théâtre-Lyrique . A fire in the house a few months after he took office led to Martinets ruin.

He then returned to painting and directed a Cercle des arts libéraux in the 1880s , in which u. a. Auguste Rodin and Auguste Renoir exhibited. In 1887 he reopened a gallery on the Boulevard des Italiens, where he only showed works by Georges Seurat . He died in 1895 while writing his memoirs.