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.

Early life

Chintreuil was born in Pont-de-Vaux and grew up in Bresse, in an educated but impoverished home. His mother, born Suzanne Clapet, ran a boarding school for girls. As a child he had a fascination for nature, and would venture into the countryside to enjoy the effects of wind, rain, and mist. He also loved to draw, and his father arranged for him to take drawing lessons from a family friend named Buisson.
His mother died at age 40, on April 29, 1832, and the boarding school closed. The 18-year-old Chintreuil became the only support of his infirm father. The college of Pont-de-Vaux, where he had been a student, gave him work as a drawing master for beginners, which allowed him to eke out a living. in 1838 or 1836, his maternal grandmother died and left him a small inheritance. He used the money to set up a fund for his father's care, and, keeping only two or three hundred francs for himself, he moved to Paris to seek his fortune.
Arriving in the city with little formal training as an artist, he produced a letter of recommendation to the distinguished botanist Pierre Boitard, who found Chintreuil's drawing skills inadequate to produce sufficiently exact renderings of plant specimens. Boitard put him to work hand-coloring engravings of plants and insects, but Chintreuil had no aptitude for coloring inside the lines, and Boitard declared that the young man would never become an artist.

Bohemian life in Paris

Chintreuil then found employment at a bookshop, where he became friends with a fellow employee, Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson, who was later to become famous writing under the byline Champfleury. Chintreuil also befriended two brothers, and, who shared his dream of becoming an artist. They were all friends of Henri Murger, who would soon begin publishing the stories that became the sensationally popular play and then novel Scénes de la vie de bohème, later the basis of Puccini's opera La bohème. Murger's characters were inspired by the struggling writers and artists around him, including Chintreuil.
When not at the bookshop, Chintreuil spent his spare time studying paintings in museums and galleries, or commiserating with Bohemian friends at cafes and in threadbare studio apartments; these were inevitably on the top floor of a building, where rooms were cheapest. In his own lodgings, Chintreuil painted sunsets and storms over the skyline of rooftops, but longed to paint from nature. In autumn of 1839, he went with Lazare Velquez on a painting excursion to the Dauphiné Alps. Chintreuil gained inspiration but lost his job at the bookstore for being absent without leave.
Chintreuil was more determined than ever to become a painter, even as his fortunes reached their lowest ebb. His equally impoverished circle became known as the Buveurs d'Eau, or Water-Drinkers, because at cafes they would occupy a room, pay for one glass of wine between them, and then drink only water. They made a vow to do only work that was worthy of their talents, refusing commercial art or writing, a decision that kept them in poverty.
Chintreuil may once have broken this rule, if inadvertently. According to Georges Montorgeuil, the chapter "Passage de la mer Rouge" in Murger's novel was based on Chintreuil. The character Marcel, after repeatedly submitting his painting The Passage of the Red Sea to the Paris Salon and repeatedly being rejected, at last agrees to sell it to a dealer in second-hand goods for 150 francs and a lobster dinner. A week later, he and his friends see the painting, not in an art gallery, but hung as a signboard above a shop. When the painting receives applause from admiring onlookers, Marcel is thrilled.
Among the cafes he frequented was the, where "Champfleury, Courbet, Baudelaire and Chintreuil were constantly to be seen." Chrintreuil was "a puny-looking, timid, somewhat awkward figure, silently puffing smoke from a long pipe," wearing his "faithful red jacket." Chintreuil is mentioned by name in Murger's private correspondence from this period. One anecdote relates how the Water-Drinkers pooled their scanty resources to set up an emergency fund.

At one meeting of the Water-Drinkers…with Murger acting as secretary…Chintreuil asked for forty francs with which to buy some cadmium. "You're beginning to be a bore," said the President , "with your conventional colors." "But I can't do without it," protested Chintreuil. "I need it for my sunsets." "Why don't you paint the sun after it has gone down," Noël retorted. However, when Chintreuil started sulking and muttering that they were trying to bar his way to success, the President relented, the Treasurer was authorized to pay out the sum requested, and all was well again.

So dire were circumstances that Chintreuil and his friends literally became starving artists and were admitted to hospital suffering the effects of malnutrition and exposure in drafty, often unheated quarters. The death from tuberculosis of Chintreuil's dear friend Joseph Desbrosses in 1844, at the age of 24, inspired the chapter "Manchon du Francine" in Murger's novel. "We are dying of hunger; we are at the end of our tether," wrote Murger in letters. "I see myself sinking deeper and deeper into the most appalling poverty: we are living together, Chintreul, Le Gothique and I—but what a life!"
In 1842, Chintreuil managed to take formal studies in the atelier of Paul Delaroche, and around 1843 he befriended Corot. Though he was never formally a pupil in Corot's atelier, the older artist exercised a profound influenced on Chintreuil. Eventually, when Corot thought Chintreuil had learned all he could teach him, Corot told him, "Now, my love, you must walk alone."
In 1843, at the Galeries des Beaux-Arts, Chintreuil sold four works for a total of 220 francs; most were genre paintings.
In 1845, Chintreuil found a patron in the famous poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger, who not only bought paintings from the younger man and paid for his art supplies, but wrote many letters of recommendation to collectors and connoisseurs.
After years of struggle and rejection, Chitreuil, at age 33, finally had a painting accepted by the Paris Salon of 1847. The next year, the Salon of 1848 accepted three of his landscapes, one of which was purchased by the French State. His career as a professional painter was at last underway.

Relationship with Jean Desbrosses; idyl in Igny; illness

In 1849, in his mid-thirties, Chintreuil entered into the most important relationship of his life, with the much younger . Jean was the little brother of Chintreuil's Bohemian comrades Joseph and Léopold; Chintreuil first befriended him as a child at the home of his parents by bringing him crayons, which made the little boy climb his legs in joy. At the age of fourteen, Jean decided to emulate his brothers and live an artist's life, which infuriated his father, who had seen one son die and another become destitute after making the same choice. Arriving at Chintreuil's doorstep "in a pouring rain, muddier than a lost dog," the boy begged to stay, "or else I'll throw myself from a bridge!" He appeared so distraught that Chrintreuil took the threat seriously, and agreed to take him in. "But I warn you," he said, "I have only half of my misery to offer you."
From that day on, the two were inseparable, united in "a friendship of infinite gentleness and unparalleled fidelity. It was to last over thirty years; death alone was to interrupt it." A contemporary compared them to famous male couples of ancient Greece: "Oh holy friendship! It has its golden book, in which Pythias and Damon, Euryale and Nisus, Orestes and Pylades are not more gloriously inscribed than will be Chintreuil and Desbrosses."
Taking excursions to the outskirts of Paris and beyond, the two became enchanted by the landscape around the village of Igny, "with its fresh meadows, its wooded hillsides, its lazy little river, and its quivering curtains of poplars." In 1850, they took a lease on a small cottage with a garden and set up rustic housekeeping. Their friend and biographer later described them as Robinson Crusoe and Friday, adventurously living by their wits not on a desert island but in the middle of France. The years at Igny were fruitful; from 1850 to 1855, Chintreuil is known to have painted at least 138 works, and his landscapes were regularly accepted for the Paris Salon.
The idyllic period at Igny was cut short in 1855 when Chintreuil became seriously ill with what was to become a chronic pulmonary ailment for the rest of his life. Doctors blamed his illness on exposure to the chilly morning dew and evening mists of the Bièvre River valley, which he braved to paint the fleeting atmospheric effects of dawn and twilight. To care for him, says Henriet, "Chintreuil found a sister of charity at his bedside in the guise of Desbrosses, who, in the desolate hours, became a whole family for this man without a family," watching over him, writes Albert de La Fizelière, "like a mother at the bedside of an adored son." Doctors insisted that Chintreuil could recuperate only in a more salubrious, drier climate, and in 1856 the couple abandoned Igny, moving to Boves, in Picardy, where Chintreuil continued to paint even as he convalesced.