Victor Orsel

André Jacques Victor Orsel (25 May 1795, Oullins - 1 November 1850, Paris) was a French painter; primarily of religious subjects.

Biography

He was born to an old merchant family of Dauphiné. His father, Jacques Orsel (1750-1800), was a gauze manufacturer in Lyon.^[1] He had three brothers: André-Jacques (1784-1868), who served as Mayor of Oullins and Tarare, Jean (1787-1847), a soldier, and Pierre Jean-Jacques (1791-1858), a writer.^[2]

He was successively a student of Pierre Révoil, at the École impériale des beaux-arts de Lyon (1809) and Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in Paris.^[3] In 1822, when Guérin was appointed Director of the French Academy in Rome, Orsel went with him. He remained there until 1830 and became associated with the Nazarene movement; especially Johann Friedrich Overbeck and his entourage.^[4] He also spent time copying works of Medieval art, whose style he incorporated into his own.

Back in France, the city of Paris commissioned him to decorate the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. A friend from Rome, Alphonse Périn, worked with him and Michel Dumas acted as their assistant. He chose to illustrate the Litanies of the Blessed Virgin Mary, divided into sixty paintings. He spent the last seventeen years of his life devoted to this project.^[5]

Among his best-known works are