Constant-Joseph Brochart

Painter and pastellist (1816–1899)

Born in 1816 in Pecq, in Belgian Hainaut, Constant-Joseph Brochart trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lille, where he was awarded a first-class medal in 1837. He subsequently settled in Paris and exhibited regularly at the Salon between 1845 and 1862. It was in pastel that he found his true calling. He made it his specialty at a time when this medium, highly fashionable in the eighteenth century, had fallen into disuse, to the extent that the Journal des Artistes hailed him in 1899 as the architect of its renaissance in France. His portraits of elegant young women, distinguished by the exquisite freshness of their complexions and palette, established his renown among a bourgeois and high-society clientele. He died in Paris in 1899.