Jules Louis Dupré
French (1811-1889)
Jules Louis Dupré was born in Nantes, France, in 1811. His father was a porcelain manufacturer in Parmain — a small village on the shores of the Oise — and by 1822 Dupré was working in the factory decorating plates. In his spare time he painted simple landscape studies from nature and eventually traveled to Paris to study with Jean-Michel Diebolt, the landscape and animal painter. In the late 1820s his father was appointed director of the Coussac porcelain factory near Limoges and Dupré took this opportunity to sketch and paint landscapes in the region. In 1831, at the age of 20, he made his debut at the Salon with a number of landscapes. That same year he was invited to London, where he spent time studying the works of the English landscape artists and painting in the English countryside. In 1833, he exhibited at the Paris Salon and received a second-class medal. However, it was the works he showed at the Salon of 1835 that solidified his reputation with many of the artists of the Romantic school. In an article written for The Magazine of Art in 1890, Ernest Chesneau noted that “His View of the Fields Near Southampton, in 1835, had won him congratulations from all the golden youth of the Romantic school, and the friendship of Decamps, Jardin, Eugene Devéria, and Eugene Delacroix, who indeed, was never tired of seeing and studying this picture.” It was also during this time that he met and became friends with Theodore Rousseau. Their friendship would last through the 1840s, and the two not only traveled together throughout the French countryside in search of new subject matter, but also shared a studio where they worked side by side.
In 1849, Dupré was awarded the Legion of Honor. By the mid 1860s he was spending most of the summer months in the coastal town of Cayeux-sur-Mer painting marine and shoreline landscapes. In the late 1860s, Millet joined him during his summer sojourns, and in the early 1870s, Courbet could also be found painting in this area. It was not until 1867 that Dupré again began to submit works to the Salon, and it was this exhibition where the artist was awarded a second-class prize.
Dupré’s work is in numerous collections, including those of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, National Gallery in London, Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Hermitage, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Rijksmuseum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
