Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran

French, 1838–1917

BiographyEmile Auguste Carolus-Duran (Charles Durand) received his first artistic training in Lille, and then studied in Paris for five years beginning in 1853. He returned to Lille in 1858, and began a successful career as a portraitist. Upon his second visit to Paris in 1859-60, the artist became close friends with Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Félix Bracquemond, and other young painters and art critics who shared his interests in realism and in the painterly traditions of Venetian and Spanish art. In 1862-66 Carolus-Duran traveled to Italy; he returned briefly to France before leaving for Spain, where he remained until 1868. By 1869 Carolus-Duran had established himself in Paris as a fashionable portraitist. In 1873 he opened a studio for young painters; John Singer Sargent was among his most talented students. By the mid 1870s Carolus-Duran had turned from his early realist style to one more concerned with painterly effect. Although primarily a portraitist, Carolus-Duran also painted landscapes, history paintings, ideal nudes, and still lifes. He was extraordinarily successful, and continued to reap honors and financial rewards to the end of his life. He died in Paris in 1917.