Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran

Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran studied art through a series of apprenticeships, but his paintings were also greatly shaped by time spent copying the Old Masters in the Louvre. He spent most of the 1860s in Italy and Spain, where he was influenced by the realistic and often somber portraits by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez. After his return to Paris, Carolus-Duran opened a studio where he taught many aspiring artists, among them the American painter John Singer Sargent. Carolus-Duran was a founding member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (The National Society of Fine Arts), which broke with the more traditional government-run Salon system, and was also the director of the prestigious Académie de France in Rome.