フランソワ・ボンヴァン

François Bonvin painted the ordinary world with quiet dignity. Born in Paris in 1817 to a police officer and seamstress, he endured a difficult childhood marked by poverty and neglect after his mother's early death. Working as a printer and then a policeman, he taught himself to draw, spending his free hours at the Louvre studying Dutch masters and Chardin. His breakthrough came in the late 1840s, when he began exhibiting truthful depictions of everyday life and still lifes—the poor people he knew directly, rendered with delicate light and modest scale.