Decamps

Decamps, ALEXANDRE-GABRIEL, a celebrated French painter, was born at Paris in 1803. A great portion of his childhood was spent in a lonely part of Picardy among the peasants, which seems to have given him a lifelong distaste for the ways of cultivated society. He studied in a desultory manner under Bouchot, Abel de Pujol, David, and Ingres, but he saw nature in his own way, and stamped the small pictures of animals which he then produced with his own individuality. His want of a thorough grounding in art, and his disinclination for systematic study, told against him, and prevented him from working with perfect ease and mastery. His effects were attained by repeated paintings, and his pictures exhibit a strong impasto, which he scraped with pumice-stone, and again retouched. In 1824 he spent the summer in Switzerland, and in 1827-28 he travelled in Italy and passed to the Levant, where he found congenial subjects, of the class that Delacroix afterwards treated, which greatly occupied his brush, and which attracted attention in the Salon of 1831. He aspired to treat historical and religious subjects: his 'Defeat of the Cimbri' (1834) attained a great success. He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1839, and became officer in 1851. He died at Fontainebleau from a hunting accident, 22d August 1860. His works prove him to have been a powerful colourist; they are effective in composition and the distribution of light and shade, and show a fine appreciation of the wilder and more picturesque aspects of man and nature. Since his death they have realised large prices, his water-colour of 'Children let out of a Turkish School' (1842) fetching 34,000 francs in Paris in 1861. See his Life by Moreau (1869).