Jehan Georges Vibert Biography

  Jehan (or Jean)-Georges Vibert began his artistic career as an engraver in the workshop of his maternal grandfather, Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet. In April 1857 Vibert enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, where he remained for six years and studied painting under Félix-Joseph Barrias (1822-1907) and François-Édouard Picot (1786-1868).

  Early Vibert paintings are indebted to the subjects and style of Picot. After his debut at the 1863 Salon, Vibert won a medal at the 1864 Salon for Narcissus Transformed into a Flower (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux), despite the scandal caused by the nudity depicted.1 Another mythological painting, Daphne and Chloe (Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Va.), was harshly criticized at the 1866 Salon; one reviewer counseled the artist "to return to the study of nature, take on a live model."2 Meanwhile, the genre painting Entrance of the Toreros (private collection) he had submitted to the same Salon enjoyed a positive response.
  Vibert realized that he would achieve greater financial and popular success with smaller genre paintings than with larger mythological and historical paintings. Possessed of a cynical wit and great technical ability, Vibert produced numerous anecdotal paintings that satirized the Catholic Church. Never completely abandoning his aspirations to the "higher" genres, Vibert showed an ambitious allegorical painting, the monumental Apotheosis of Adolphe Thiers (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), at the 1878 Salon, but the painting, too, elicited extremely negative responses, though it was bought by the state.

  Also interested in the technique of watercolor, Vibert was a founding member of the Society of French Watercolorists in 1878 and served as its first president.Vibert invented a number of products for painters, including special varnishes, brushes, and a red paint, which he named "Vibert Red”3 and used for his many images of cardinals. Vibert was intensely involved in the theater and wrote several satirical plays in the style of Molière, whom he greatly admired. Jehan Georges Vibert married one of the leading actresses of the Comédie Française, Maria Lloyd, but they divorced in 1887. Vibert wrote frequently on art matters, and at the time of his death in 1902 he was compiling an autobiography, illustrated with reproductions of his paintings.