RIBOT, Théodule-Augustin
French painter. After his father died in 1840, Ribot trained himself as an artist while working as a bookkeeper in Elbeuf, a small village near Rouen. In 1845 he married and moved to Paris, where he worked as a decorator of gilded frames for a mirror manufacturer and became a pupil in the studio of Auguste-Barthélémy Glaize (1807-1893). He painted architectural backgrounds for Glaize and made his own studies from the nude model.
Around 1848 he went to Algeria, where he worked as a foreman. After his return to Paris in 1851 he practiced a variety of trades to support himself, colouring lithographs, decorating window-shades, painting signs and making copies of paintings by Watteau for the American market. It was not until the late 1850s that he began to produce his own paintings, working on realistic subjects at night by lamplight. This circumstance inspired his interest in the chiaroscuro effects that were to characterize his later paintings.
Debuting at the Salon of 1861, he received medals in 1864 and 1865, as well as a third class medal in 1878, the same year in which he received the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. In addition to the Paris exhibitions, he also showed works in Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna and numerous provincial Salons.
Ribot was one of the founders of the Salon du Champs de Mars, along with Alphonse Legros, Henri Fantin-Latour, and James McNeill Abbott Whistler. Like these artists, Ribot shared an admiration for Gustave Courbet and Realism. In addition, his works show an affinity with seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish painting, especially Ribera and Frans Hals. Known as an artist who took an independent approach to his trade, in 1884 a group of friends, including Fantin-Latour, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Jean-Charles Cazin, François Raffaëlli, and Claude Monet gave him a medal of honour inscribed: A Théodule Ribot, le peintre indépendant.
As a painter of many subjects including genre, history, still-lifes, and portraits, Ribot shows a rich concern with the effects of painting plein air and the psychological effects of contrasts between darks and lights.
