Léon Girardet
1856–1895 · French painter and engraver of Swiss descent, known for Orientalist and genre scenes
Léon Girardet (Versailles, 1856 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1895) was a French painter and engraver of Swiss descent, born into a Huguenot family. His work, with its Orientalist and everyday subjects, places him among the academic painters of late nineteenth-century France.
He was the son of Paul Girardet, a copper engraver. He first trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Alexandre Cabanel. Between 1878 and 1879 he travelled to Algeria with his parents, hoping to improve his fragile health, and returned there in 1880 with his brothers Eugène and Jules. These journeys produced several Orientalist paintings, inspired by the work of Eugène.
Most of his paintings are anecdotal genre scenes aimed at a middle-class public. They have a relaxed mood, showing people in conversation or going about simple tasks. As an engraver, he only reproduced his father's designs. He exhibited in both France and Switzerland. His health did not improve, and he died at the age of thirty-nine. Several members of his family were painters or engravers, but his name is mainly linked to Orientalist scenes of everyday life.