Gustave COURTOIS ✿

Gustave-Claude-Étienne Courtois, also known as Gustave Courtois (1852-1923) was a French painter, a representative of the academic style of art.

Gustave Courtois, born in a small village in Haute-Saône, was a natural child and his mother devoted herself totally to him and to his education. Soon, still very young, he showed a particular interest in art, so much so that he was enrolled in the "Municipal School of Drawing" of Vesoul, in Franche Comte.

One day his works were shown to the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme who, in 1869, advised him to enter the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Which he did the following year. In the classrooms of the famous Parisian institute Courtois met another student, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. From 1880 the two painters even shared the same studio, a fashionable atelier located in an elegant suburb of Paris: Neuilly-sur-Seine.

In 1882 he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor. He taught painting at the Grande Chaumière Academy and at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. His pupils were Minerva Josephine Chapman, Georges d'Espagnat, Maurice Prendergast, Dora Hitz, Amélie Lundahl, the Finnish Elin Danielson Gambogi, Willard Dryden Paddock and Sara Page. Courtois was initiated by Jean Gérôme into academic painting and throughout his life remained fundamentally an artist of academic expression. His works are exhibited in the museums of Besançon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Luxembourg.

< Gustave COURTOIS dans son atelier par Pascal Dagnan Bouveret