Gustave Boulanger
(b Paris, 25 April 1824; d Paris, Oct
1888).
French painter. Born of creole parents, Boulanger
became an orphan at 14. His uncle and guardian sent him
to the studio of Pierre-Jules Jollivet and then in 1840
to Paul Delaroche, whose prosaic Realism and dry,
careful technique influenced Boulanger’s style of
painting. A first visit to Algeria in 1845 gave him an
interest in North African subjects, which was taken up
later by his friend Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1849 he won the
Prix de Rome with Ulysses Recognized by his Nurse
(Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.), in which he combined
academic figure drawing with Pompeian touches inspired
by Ingres’s Antiochus and Stratonice (1840;
Chantilly, Mus. Condé). Boulanger’s knowledge of the
ruins at Pompeii, which he visited while studying at the
Ecole de Rome, gave him ideas for many future pictures,
including the Rehearsal in the House of the Tragic
Poet (1855; St Petersburg, Hermitage), in which the
influence of Stratonice is still obvious. This
was later developed into the Rehearsal of the ‘Flute
Player’ and the ‘Wife of Diomedes’ (1861;
Versailles, Château), which recorded the preparations
being made for a performance given before the imperial
Court in Napoleon’s mock-Pompeian Paris house. Boulanger
specialized in painting studies of daily life from
ancient Greece and Rome, as well as Arab subjects. He
also painted a number of decorative schemes, at the
theatre of the Casino in Monte Carlo (1879), at the
Paris Opéra (1861–74) and other locations, opportunities
gained through his friendship with CHARLES GARNIER, his
fellow pensionnaire at the Ecole de Rome. He
entered the Institut de France in 1882 and became an
influential teacher, well known for his dislike of the
Impressionists and their successors.
