Champfleury

Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson (1820 Laon, Aisne - 1889 Sèvres), who wrote under the name Champfleury, was a French art critic and novelist, a prominent supporter of the Realist movement in painting and fiction.

In 1843 Fleury-Husson moved to Paris. He met Charles Baudelaire and the next year started writing art criticism under the pen-name "Champfleury" for the journal L’Artiste. He was one of the first to promote the work of Gustave Courbet, in an article appearing in an issue of Le Pamphlet in 1848.

In 1850 he advocated the work of El Greco, and wrote about the Le Nain brothers and Maurice Quentin de La Tour.

He edited the periodical, Le réalisme in 1856 and 1857.

His novels, of which the best-known is Les bourgeois de Molinchart (1854), were among the earliest Realist works.

From 1872 until his death in 1889 he was Chief of Collections at the Sèvres porcelain factory.

The character of Marcel in Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, and thus the corresponding character Marcello in Puccini's opera based on it, was partially based on Champfleury. Champfleury was a friend of Murger and they had roomed together for a time.

Publications

• Troubat, Souvenirs sur Champfleury et le Réalisme (Paris, 1905)

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