Julien Dupré (French painter) 1851 - 1910
Julien Dupré was described in an article in the Magazine of Art (1891) as: "...one of the most rising artists of the French School". Although he was student of Isadore Pils and Henri Lehmann at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Dupré’s great master was the rural genre painter Désiré François Laugée, whose daughter he would marry in 1876. Dupré exhibited works at every Salon exhibition from 1876 until his death in 1910 and earned critical acclaim for his depictions of peasant life. He was awarded medals at several Salon Exhibitions and received a Gold Medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1889 for his pictorial representations of the life of the farm worker. Dupré was very successful during his lifetime both in Europe and the United States. Wealthy American patrons traveled to Paris to acquire his works and they became part of the great collections of the 19th century. Many of these collections, in turn, would become the cornerstones of our great museums. * * * Thérèse Marthe Françoise Cotard-Dupré (French painter) 1877 - 1920 Thérèse Marthe Françoise Dupré was the daughter of Julien Dupré (1851-1910), a leading member of the Barbizon School and influential French realist painter. Her work was highly influenced by both her father and her uncle, George Laugée (1853-1937), also a painter, and like her father her works depict idealised visions of peasant life in rural France. She exhibited at the Salon in 1899 and became a member of the Société des Artistes Français, receiving a third class medal in 1907. She married the artist Edmond Cotard in 1889, with whom she had two children, Henri Edmond Cotard and François Cotard, who both became artists themselves.
