MOREAU, Adrien

French painter and illustrator. A pupil of Léon Cogniet and Isidore Pils at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Moreau exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1868. He was awarded a second-class medal at the Salon of 1876, silver in 1899 and at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, and was made Chévalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1892.

In addition to painting popular historical genre scenes, he also produced book illustrations, notably those for an edition of Candide by Voltaire in 1893.

Silver Wedding

This signed and dated painting depicts the celebration of a wealthy couple’s silver wedding anniversary during the seventeenth century. The painter fills the scene with richly painted details, harkening back to the Dutch seventeenth-century genre painters, chief among them Gabriël Metsu. The revival of this style in the nineteenth century was led by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, whose paintings were enormously popular among the newly wealthy European and American bourgeois of his day.

Silver Wedding

Silver Wedding (detail)