Nicolas-André Monsiau

Who was Nicolas-André Monsiau?

Nicolas-André Monsiau was a French history painter and a refined draughtsman who turned to book illustration to supplement his income when the French Revolution disrupted patronage. His cool Poussiniste drawing style and coloring marked his conservative art in the age of Neoclassicism.

His training at the school of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Paris, was under the direction of Jean-François-Pierre Peyron. An early patron, the marquis de Corberon, paid for a sojourn at Rome, where he studied at the French Academy in Rome from 1776. On his return to Paris, he was unable to exhibit in the annual Paris salons, which were closed to all but those who had been received by the Académie or were members, under the Ancien Régime. Instead he found an outlet in the smaller Salon de la corréspondance, where in 1782 he showed a tenebrist Piquant effect of the light of a lamp.

Two years later he was received at the Académie with a historical subject, Alexander taming Bucephalus and was made a member 3 October 1787, his second attempt, on the strength of The Death of Agis.