Ernest Ange Duez

Ernest Duez died in April 1896 of a cerebral haemorrhage while cycling in the forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris. He was 53 and a pillar of the art world. A pupil of the academic painter Isidore Pils, he had sat eight times on the Salon jury, and after 1890 he was part of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the society formed as a rival to the official Salon.

His painting sat between two camps. He admired and collected Manet, Monet, Degas and Morisot, yet kept a quieter palette and a more controlled technique than theirs. His triptych Saint Cuthbert, set in Normandy landscapes, is in the Musée d'Orsay, and so is his portrait of his friend the painter Ulysse Butin, shown at the Salon of 1880, standing at an easel in the grass facing the sea. In the 1880s the American painter John Singer Sargent, his neighbour on the boulevard Berthier, painted portraits of both Duez and his wife Amélie.