Jean-Pierre Laurens

Jean-Pierre Laurens (Paris, 1875 – Fontenay-aux-Roses, 1932) was a French painter best known for figure and portrait work. The youngest son of the painter Jean-Paul Laurens, he trained in Paris under Léon Bonnat at the École des Beaux-Arts.

He first exhibited at the Salon in 1899, earning a third-class medal. A silver medal and a travel grant followed in 1900, and a second-class medal in 1906. Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War he was wounded in the leg and captured near Rocquigny. From September 1914 he was held at the prison camp at Wittenberg, south of Berlin, where he sketched the harsh conditions and the typhus epidemic that swept through the camp. He was later moved to a labour camp in Courland and, after the war, spent time at a Red Cross camp in Switzerland. He kept his drawings, which were published in 1918 as Prisonniers de guerre. Cahier à la mémoire des compagnons de captivité du camp de Wittenberg.

In 1928 he was commissioned to decorate the church of Notre-Dame-du-Calvaire in Châtillon. He died before the project was finished, and his wife, the sculptor Yvonne Diéterle, took his place. In 1930 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He also taught at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian; his students included Fang Ganmin, František Kupka and Arthur Paunzen. His works are held in museums such as the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux and the Musée National d'Art Moderne.