Antoine Berjon

Antoine Berjon (Saint-Pierre-de-Vaise, near Lyon, 1754 - Lyon, 1843) was one of the most important flower painters in nineteenth-century France. He worked in oil, pastel, watercolour and ink, and his work links the Dutch tradition of flower still lifes with the taste of the Enlightenment.

The son of a butcher, he first studied drawing with the local sculptor Antoine-Michel Perrache. His early years are poorly documented: his biographer J. Gaubin, whose account is uncorroborated, suggests he may have studied medicine or followed a religious vocation, and that he learned flower painting during his novitiate. He then worked as a textile designer in Lyon's silk industry until its collapse during the French Revolution. No paintings from the 1780s have been traced.

In 1791 the Paris Salon accepted four of his works, including Still Life of Peaches and Grapes. He settled in Paris in 1794, where he befriended the miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin and the portraitist Claude-Jean-Baptiste Hoin, and he exhibited at the Salon at least five times during his seventeen years there. He returned to Lyon in 1810 and that year became professor of flower design at the newly founded École des Beaux-Arts. He was dismissed in 1823, probably because his stubborn temperament clashed with the school's administration, and contemporaries saw him as self-absorbed. He then opened a private studio in Lyon and kept painting until his death at 89.

His best-known work, Still Life with Flowers, Shells, a Shark's Head, and Petrifications (1819), pairs richly detailed blossoms with natural-history objects, reflecting the Enlightenment interest in nature. Bouquet of Lilies and Roses in a Basket Resting on a Chiffonier (1814), held by the Louvre, is another characteristic piece. He also worked as a portraitist, as in J. Halévy with his Brother and Sister (1820).]