Pierre Joseph Célestin François

Pierre Joseph Célestin François (Namur, 1759 - Brussels, 1851), also known as Joseph François, was a history, genre and miniature painter and etcher from the Southern Netherlands. His religious and mythological subjects and his portraits, executed in a Neoclassical style, place him among the figures who bridged the academic traditions of eighteenth-century Flemish painting and the Neoclassicism that shaped Belgian art in the early nineteenth century.

Born in Namur, he grew up in Charleroi, where he first learned drawing from Pierre Balthasar de Blocq. Around the age of eleven he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he spent eight years under Willem Jacob Herreyns, a late follower of Rubens, and Andries Cornelis Lens. After travels to France, he spent time in Rome and visited Vienna before returning to Antwerp. He was back in Rome in 1789 and remained there for three years, with patrons that included Prince Lambertini.

He eventually settled in Brussels, where he became a professor at the Academy and at the local Atheneum. Teaching and decorative commissions with mythological themes occupied much of his time, and on some of these works he worked alongside Lens, who had also moved to Brussels. His known works include Marius Sitting on the Ruins of Carthage, A Physician Consulted by Two Old Women and The Assumption.

His legacy rests largely on his many pupils, among them François-Joseph Navez, Jean Baptiste Madou and Henri Decaisne, and on the training of his son Ange François, who worked in his studio.