From the garden, from the orchard, from the sea - selected work by Antoine Berjon

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Antoine Berjon (17 May 1754, St. Pierre de Vaise - 24 October 1843, Lyon), French painter and designer, among the most important flower painters of early nineteenth-century France. Born in a commune of Lyon, the son of a butcher, he first studied drawing with the local sculptor Antoine-Michel Perrache. Little is known of his early life,  though it is thought that he may have studied medicine or for a religious vocation. But he is known to have worked as a designer of textiles in Lyon's important silk industry until its collapse with the French Revolution. In 1791, the Paris Salon accepted four of his work; he subsequently visited the capital frequently, and moved there in 1794. He remained in Paris for the next sixteen years, exhibiting at the Salon at least five times. By the time he returned to Lyon he was well known, and was made a professor at the newly established École des Beaux-Arts, which had been founded by Napoléon's decree of 1807 with the goal of reviving Lyon's silk industry. He was dismissed in 1823 after a thirteen years in the position, and was replaced by his gifted pupil Augustin Thierrat. His termination was probably due to his well-known stubbornness and egotism, qualities that most likely put him in conflict with the school's administration. He then set up his own studio in Lyon, giving private instruction, and continued to make art for the remainder of his life. He died in Lyon at the age of eighty-nine.

Terra-cotta bust of Berjon by Clément Jayet, 1788.