In the year 1836 a young student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he had studied under Drolling and Picot, entered into the school competition for the Prix de Rome and won it. His name was Felix Auguste Clement, and he was born in 1826 at Donzere, in the Department of Drome. The course of his artistic life began at the Art School of the city of Lyons in 1843, and in 1848 he came to Paris. The four years he spent in Italy as a pensioner of the State proved fruitful in good work. At that time he made a special study of Roman antiquities and history, upon which he based his picture of "The Death of Caesar" and others. After his return to Paris, where he found a profitable market as a portrait painter and for his Italian genre pictures, he became interested in the history of ancient Egypt, and eventually visited that country, where he made a protracted stay and gathered much valuable material. His travels in Egypt were probably more extensive than those of any other modern artist. No ancient ruin was too remote for him to visit, and the mass of studies he made bore fruit on his coming back to France in a powerful picture of "The Destruction of Babylon." He varied his historical compositions by many pictures of Oriental every-day life, and other more

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Chapter 9 Text

Felix Auguste Clement