Édouard Brandon

Origins and early life

Jacob Émile Édouard Brandon was born in the third arrondissement of Paris on 3 July 1831 and died in the eighteenth on 12 May 1897. He studied at the École des beaux-arts, among his masters Camille Corot, and spent the years 1856 to 1863 in Rome, where he met Edgar Degas; the two exchanged and collected each other's work, and Brandon trained in his own studio painters close to that circle, among them Henri Rouart.

Work and career

He is counted, with Édouard Moyse and Alphonse Lévy, as one of the three French painters of Judaism in the nineteenth century, painting synagogue interiors and Jewish ceremonies at a time when no French museum expected such subjects; several of those canvases are now held by the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris. The fiche should say plainly that his work was not confined to that: he also painted Christian subjects and contributed to the decoration of Catholic religious buildings, which was how a painter earned his living in that century.

He took part in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, alongside Monet, Degas and Pissarro, which places him at the opening of modern painting. After his death his collection of 176 works was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in December 1897.