Antoine Chintreuil

Antoine Chintreuil was a French landscape painter. He was among the starving artists who lived la vie de bohéme in Paris in the 1840s, as popularized by his friend and fellow Bohemian, the novelist Henri Murger. In 1863, he was one of the principal organizers of the Salon des Refusés, which set in motion major reforms in the workings of the annual Paris Salon. He has been called the "great-grandfather of the Impressionists," but Chintreuil himself was never part of a movement, and his paintings, especially the major works from the last decade of his life, remain difficult for critics and art historians to classify. The height of his fame came in the years immediately after his death from tuberculosis in 1873, when his life-partner and fellow artist Jean Desbrosses promoted his legacy with a major book and exhibition in Paris. His reputation later waned, but a large exhibition of his work was mounted in France in 2002, and his works are held in museums across France, with the largest holdings at the Musée d'Orsay.