Jules Joseph Lefebvre

Jules Joseph Lefebvre was a French academic painter best known for graceful single female figures, painted with smooth, polished skin, precise drawing and cool, clear light.

Born in Tournan-en-Brie, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Léon Cogniet and won the Prix de Rome in 1861. From 1870 he taught at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he had a huge number of students, many of them American. Among them were Fernand Khnopff, Félix Vallotton and the American Impressionists Edmund Tarbell and Willard Metcalf. His painting Truth (1870), a nude figure holding up a mirror, is in the Musée d’Orsay, and his Chloé hangs famously in a Melbourne hotel bar.

In Truth and in portraits like Julia Foster Ward, look at the fine modelling of skin and the sharply drawn outlines, typical of the Paris Salon at its height.