Régis François Gignoux

1816-1882

Régis François Gignoux trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and Paris under Hippolyte Delaroche, who encouraged him toward landscape painting. In 1840 he left France for the United States, eventually settling in Brooklyn and then New York, where he became a founding member of the Tenth Street Studio Building alongside Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and John Frederick Kensett. A member of the National Academy of Design and first president of the Brooklyn Art Academy, he also taught George Inness, John La Farge, and Charles Dormon Robinson. Within the Hudson River School he carved out a distinctive niche as its principal painter of snow scenes, alongside meticulous views of Northeastern American terrain such as his celebrated 1843 rendering of Mammoth Cave's interior. He returned to France in 1870 and died in Paris in 1882. His paintings are held today by institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.