Albert de Belleroche

Count Albert Gustavus de Belleroche (22 October 1864 – 14 July 1944), also known as Albert Belleroche, was a Welsh painter and lithographer, who lived most of his childhood and his adulthood in Paris and England. He began as a painter, but at the turn of the century focused on lithography, for which he is most well-known. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre de Leopold by King Albert I of Belgium in 1933.

Early life

Albert Gustavus de Belleroche was born on 22 October 1864 in Swansea, Wales. His father was Edward Charles, the Marquis de Belleroche, who died when Albert was three years old. preferring to study the masters like Johannes Vermeer and Sandro Botticelli at museums.

Belleroche was financially independent and did not need or desire to obtain work through commissions. Instead, he chose whom he would paint, which included Japanese wrestler Taro Miyake; painter Victorine Meurent, who modelled also for Édouard Manet and became famous as his Olympia; dancer and spy Mata Hari; and acrobat Cha-U-Kao. At the Salon d'Automne in 1904, a room was dedicated to his paintings and lithographs. The couple had a daughter Alice and two sons, Harry and William. In 2001, Steven Kern published The Rival of Painting: the lithographs of Albert Belleroche.

Belleroche's works are in the collections of the National Museum of Wales, Bibliothèque Royale, Musée du Luxembourg, Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the British Museum in London. The San Diego Museum of Art has a large collection of Belleroche prints, some of which were included in the exhibition that they held entitled "A Century of Lithography".

In 2024 the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum held a Belleroche exhibition titled A Painter in Paris.

Gallery