Vernet, Joseph

Vernet, (Claude-) Joseph

“The Mask of Joseph Vernet,” chalk and pastel portrait by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour; …

(credit: Lauros—Giraudon from Art Resource/EB Inc.)

(born Aug. 14, 1714, Avignon, France—died Dec. 3, 1789, Paris) French painter. Son of a decorative painter, he catered to a new taste for idealized, somewhat sentimentalized landscapes. His shipwrecks, sunsets, and conflagrations reveal a subtle observation of light and atmosphere. His series of 15 Ports of France (1754–65), his finest works, constitute a remarkable record of 18th-century life. His son Carle (1758–1836) produced vast battle scenes for Napoleon, but his real talent was for intimate genre scenes and drawing. His long series of fashionable studies, often satirizing contemporary manners and costume, were widely reproduced as engravings. After the restoration of the monarchy he became court painter to Louis XVIII. Carle's son Horace (1789–1863) developed a remarkable facility for working on a grand scale and became one of France's most important military painters.