Antoine Berjon

Who was Antoine Berjon?

Antoine Berjon was a French painter and designer, among the most important flower painters of 19th-century France. He worked in a variety of media including oil, pastel, watercolour, and ink.

Berjon was born in St Pierre de Vaise, a commune of Lyon, to the son of a butcher, and he first studied drawing with the local sculptor Antoine-Michel Perrache. His early history is not clear; according to his uncorroborated biographer J. Gaubin, he may have studied medicine or a religious vocation, learning flower painting during his novitiate. He went to work as a designer of textiles in Lyon's important silk industry until its collapse with the French Revolution.

Berjon's paintings from the 1780s are untraced. In 1791, the Paris Salon accepted four of his works, including Still Life of Peaches and Grapes. He visited Paris often in the early 1790s and moved there in 1794, becoming a friend of Jean-Baptiste-Jean Augustin, a painter of miniatures, and of Claude-Jean-Baptiste Hoin, a portraitist. Living in Paris for 17 years, he exhibited at the Salon at least five times.