Hippolyte Flandrin's father, though brought up in business, had great fondness for art, and sought himself to follow an artist's career. Lack of early training, however, disabled him for success, and he was obliged to take up the precarious occupation of a miniature painter.

Hippolyte was the second of three sons, all painters, and two of them eminent. The third son Paul (b. 1811) ranked as one of the leaders of the modern landscape school of France. Augusto (1804-1842), the eldest, passed the greater part of his life as professor at Lyons, where he died. After studying for some time at Lyons, Hippolyte and Paul, set out to walk to Paris in 1829, to place themselves under the tuition of Hersent. They chose finally to enter the atelier of Ingres, who became not only their instructor but their friend for life.

At first considerably hampered by poverty, Hippolyte Flandrin's difficulties were forever removed by his taking, in 1832, the Grand Prix de Rome, awarded for his picture of the Recognition of Theseus by his Father. This allowed him to study five years at Rome, where he sent home several pictures which considerably raised his fame.

St. Clair healing the Blind was done for the cathedral of Nantes, and years after, at the exhibition of 1855, brought him a medal of the first class. Jesus and the Little Children was given by the government to the town of Lisieux. Dante and Virgil Visiting the Envious Men Struck with Blindness, and Euripides Writing His Tragedies, belong to the museum at Lyons. Below is his nude Young Man by the Sea, which I have also reproduced for sale.

Young Man by the Sea

Returning to Paris through Lyons in 1838, Flandrin soon received a commission to ornament the chapel of St. John in the church of St. Severin at Paris, and his reputation increased yet further -- employment was abundant for the rest of his life. Besides the pictures mentioned above, and others of a similar kind, he painted a great number of portraits. The works, however, upon whin his fame most surely rests are his monumental decorative paintings.

In 1856 Hippolyte Flandrin was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts. In 1863 his failing health, rendered worse by incessant toil and exposure to the damp and draughts of churches, induced him again to visit Italy. He died of smallpox at Rome on the 21st of March 1864.

As might naturally be expected in one who looked upon painting as but the vehicle for the expression of spiritual sentiment, he had perhaps too little pride in the technical qualities of his art. There is shown in his works much of that austerity and coldness, expressed in form and colour, which springs from a faith which feels itself in opposition to the tendencies of surrounding life.

Hippolyte Flandrin has been compared to Fra Angelico; but the faces of his long processions of saints and martyrs seem to express rather the austerity of souls convicted of sin than the joy and purity of never-corrupted life which shines from the work of the early master.