Théodore Lévigne

Théodore Lévigne was born in Noirétable in the Forez hills in 1848, the son of a bootmaker, and grew up in the Saint-Jean quarter of Lyon, where his family moved in 1856. He entered the Lyon École des Beaux-Arts at twelve and at fifteen won its highest award, the Laurier d’Or; a scholarship from the city took him to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the studios of Cabanel and Gérôme.

Disappointed by Paris, he returned to Lyon, regained his stipend in 1867 and spent the rest of his career there, exhibiting at the Lyon and Paris Salons.

Lévigne painted everything — portraits, still lifes, hunting and military scenes, genre pictures of Lyonnais life — but his reputation rests on his landscapes: the misty waterways and wintry half-tones of the Lyon countryside, the Loire and Dauphiné hills, and, in contrast, the sunlit Mediterranean coast. The decorations he painted for the Peillard estate near Noirétable have been the subject of a recent study.

Rediscovered in recent years by the auction houses, he is represented in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and in the museums of Roanne and Saint-Étienne. He died in Lyon in 1912.