André Devambez
best-known his whimsical illustrations of children's books and his dramatic paintings of Paris scenes and of early airplanes from a viewpoint high above.
[2] In 1870 his parents opened their own studio at Passage des Panoramas, called the Maison Devambez, which he built into a major publishing house, commissioning and selling engravings and other art.
His father arranged private lessons with Gabriel Gouray, a former student of Jean-Léon Gérôme, who encouraged the young Devambez to become a history painter.
[4] In 1885 he succeeded in the entry examination to the École des Beaux-arts, where he studied with Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Gustave Boulanger.
In 1894 he submitted to the Academy a painting of "The Legend of Saint Agatha", with multiple characters in varied poses; then, in 1898, a monumental work depicting "The Conversion of the Madeleine", which obtained for him the Medal of Second Class.
In 1899 he was elected a member of the Société des Artistes Français, at whose annual Salon he exhibited, and in 1905 he became a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.
[2] In 1929, he was named head of the painting section at the École des Beaux-Arts, France's most prestigious art school,[5] a position he retained until 1937.
In his youth he lived in the sixth floor of a building at the corner of boulevard Montmartre and rue Vivienne, and saw the activity and crowds in the Paris streets spread out below him.
This dramatic scene, painted in about 1902, is an aerial view of a violent nighttime confrontation as the Paris police broke up a demonstration of labor union workers on strike on the Boulevard Montmartre.
Ironically, though Devambez was a sympathiser of the strikers, the painting ended up hanging in the office of the Prefect of Police, Chiappe, who had ordered the repression of the strike.
In 1909, he made a colour lithograph of a "Dirigible-Bus", a whimsical imaginary vehicle that combined the features of Paris municipal bus and a balloon.
He completed designs for the twelve panels, but due to a financial scandal in another part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the project was left unfinished, and the paintings were not installed.
They were generally only a few dozen centimetres in size, and sometimes were set in very elaborate frames, and became a kind of display object, between a sculpture and a painting.
In 1936, during the Great Depression, he faced some financial difficulties, and reverted to his earlier style to produce a large and highly decorative work, full of symbolism and color, on the Classical Greek theme of Ulysses and Calypso.
His son became an archeologist and later became curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the Louvre, Books illustrated by André Devambez include La Fête à Coqueville by Émile Zola (Éditions Fasquelle [fr], 1899);[5] Le Poilu a Gagné la Guerre by Charles Le Goffic (1919); and Les Condamnés à Mort by Claude Farrère (Édouard-Joseph & L’Illustration, 1920).
