André Devambez
1867–1944 · France · Academic art, Illustration
The story
As a young man André Devambez lived on the sixth floor of a building at the corner of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Rue Vivienne in Paris, with the crowds of the boulevard spread out below him. That high viewpoint shapes his most famous painting, The Charge, now in the Musée d'Orsay, in which police cut through a crowd of demonstrators on the Boulevard Montmartre, seen from far above.
The son of a Paris engraver and printer, Devambez had a thoroughly official career, with the Prix de Rome in 1890, a professorship at the École des Beaux-Arts and a seat in the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Alongside it he worked as an illustrator with a sharp sense of humour. The Musée d'Orsay holds nine of his works.
