Léon Cogniet

Léon Cogniet painted history pictures and portraits in the Romantic years of French painting, with strong contrasts of light and dark and figures caught at moments of high emotion. His Massacre of the Innocents, with a mother pressed into a corner clutching her child, is the kind of close, tense scene he did best.

He was born in Paris in 1794, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin and won the Prix de Rome in 1817, spending the following years at the French Academy in Rome. Back in Paris he painted a ceiling on Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition for the Louvre and murals for the church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs.

Cogniet is probably best remembered as a teacher. More than a hundred students passed through his studio, among them Rosa Bonheur, Léon Bonnat and Ernest Meissonier, and he was professor at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1851 to 1863. He died in Paris in 1880.