Théophile Silvestre He was born on 12 October 1823 in Le Fossat, Ariège, France, to a bourgeois Catholic family.

[2] He then studied medicine in Toulouse, law in Paris and attended courses at the École Nationale des Chartes.

[4] In 1852, Silvestre began writing History of Living Artists, French and Foreign: Studies from Nature (French: l'Histoire des artistes vivants, français et étrangers, études d’après nature), a collection of biographical studies of living painters, sculptors, architects, engravers, photographers and composers.

Silvestre commissioned photographers Édouard Baldus and Henri Le Secq to produce portraits of his subjects and reproductions of their work to include in his studies.

[1] The first series, in order of appearance in the 1856 edition, included profiles of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Paul Chenavard, Alexandre Gabriel Decamps, Antoine-Louis Barye, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Gustave Courbet, Antoine-Augustin Préault, and François Rude.