Regnault, ALEXANDRE GEORGES HENRI, painter, was born in Paris, 30th October 1843, the son of Henri Victor Regnault (q.v.). His aptitude for drawing manifested itself very early, and he was continually sketching the animals in the Jardin des Plantes. After an excellent career in the Lycée Napoléon, he left school in 1859, and studied art under Lamothe and Cabanel; and, after two unsuccessful attempts, gained the prix de Rome in 1866. Reaching Rome early in the following year, he executed there a remarkable portrait of Madame Duparc, and his historical subject of 'Automedon breaking the Horses of Achilles,' and drew on wood illustrations for Way's Rome. He next passed to Spain with his friend Clarin; and here, as afterwards in Tangier, he found subjects of that wildly picturesque character which best suited his genius. In 1869 he painted his powerful equestrian portrait of General Prim, now in the Louvre, and his 'Judith,' and in 1870 contributed his 'Salomé' to the Salon. In 1870 was also painted, at Tangier, his terrible picture, 'The Execution without Judgment under the Moorish Kings of Granada'—a work now in the Louvre. In the same year he returned to Paris on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war; and though, as a prix de Rome, he was exempt from military service, he volunteered as a private soldier, and on the 19th January 1871 was slain on the field of Buzenval, in his twenty-eighth year. As an artist he had by no means fully expressed himself; but he had produced much that was marked by great energy and power, that caught in a peculiarly vivid way the splendid and barbaric life of the East—a life, in the words of the painter himself, 'at once rich and great, terrible and voluptuous.' A monument to Regnault, sculptured by Henri Chapu, has been erected in the École des Beaux Arts, Paris.
See the Lives, in French, by Cazalis (1872) and Marx (1887), and his Correspondance, ed. by Duparc (1873).