(b Lyon, 25 March 1823; d Orsay, Seine-et-Oise, 26 Sept 1887). French painter and lithographer. He was a student of Etienne Rey (1789-1867) and then of Jean-Claude Bonnefond (1796-1860) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon (1840-43). On the advice of Alphonse P?rin (1798-1874), he then moved to Paris, where he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1844 and first exhibited at the Salon in 1857. He worked for 11 years with P?rin and his teacher and friend Victor Orsel on decorations for the chapel of the Eucharist in the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette in Paris and in 1854 executed a series of reproductions of work by Orsel. From 1857 to 1862 he stayed in Italy, where he probably met the Nazarenes who had not yet left Rome (Friedrich Overbeck, Gebhard Flatz and Franz Riepenhausen). Back in Paris, he became friendly with such sculptors of the Second Empire as Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Alexandre Falgui?re and Auguste Cl?singer. From 1866, under the influence of his sculptor friends, Bertrand devoted himself to representing allegories and genre scenes in which he abandoned his early Nazarene style. These were pleasant compositions showing the great heroines of history and the novel, as in the Death of Sappho (1867), the Death of Virginie (1869), the Death of Manon Lescaut (1870) and the Death of Ophelia (1872). These works, widely known through engravings, assured him a certain popularity.
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