Narcisse Virgile Diaz De La Peña
Narcisse Virgile Diaz De La Peña;Narcisse Virgile Diaz De La Pena
Place: Bordeaux
Born: 1807
Death: 1876
Biography:
Narcisse Virgilio Díaz de la Peña was a French painter of the Barbizon school. He was born in Bordeaux to Spanish parents. After their early deaths, he grew up in foster care at Meudon. At thirteen, an infection, caused by an insect sting or snake bite, led to the amputation of his leg. He entered the studios at Sèvres, first working on the decoration of porcelain and later turning to painting. Turkish and Oriental scenes attracted him, and he took to painting Eastern figures dressed in richly coloured garments. He also spent much time at Barbizon, near the Fontainebleau Forest, where some of his most famous paintings were made. He exhibited many pictures at the Paris Salon, and was decorated in 1851 with the rank of Chevalier (Knight) of the Légion d’honneur. During the Franco-German War (1870-1871) he went to Brussels. After 1871, his works became fashionable and rose gradually in the estimation of collectors, and he worked constantly and successfully. Díaz's finest pictures are his forest scenes and storms, and it is on these that his fame rests. There are several examples of his work in the Louvre, and three small figure pictures in the Wallace Collection, Hertford House. Perhaps the most notable of Diaz's works are The Pearl Fairy (1857); Sunset in the Forest (1868); The Forest of Fontainebleau (1870), and The Storm (1871). The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds some two dozen works by Díaz, including another version of The Forest of Fontainebleau and many drawings and studies. Diaz himself had no well-known pupils, but François Visconti emulated his work to some degree and Léon Richet followed markedly his methods of tree-painting. For a period, Jean-François Millet also painted small figures in avowed imitation of Diaz's then popular subjects. Renoir once said 'my hero was Díaz'. In 1876, while visiting his son's grave, he caught a cold. He went to Menton in an attempt to recover his health, but on 18 November that year he died.
