Hippolyte Sebron

Hippolyte Victor Valentin Sebron (21 August 1801 - 1 September 1879) was a French landscape, cityscape and portrait painter. He was also a photographer and worked in pastels.

Biography Baptism of Prince Philippe, Count of Paris (1841), commissioned by King Louis-Philippe. Sebron was born 21 August 1801 in Caudebec-en-Caux, France. He studied at the École des Beaux-arts. At first, he worked as a decorative painter. His first exhibition at the Salon came in 1825. Soon, he gained a reputation as a painter of interior portraits. Later, he became a student of Léon Cogniet.

In 1827, while decorating the new Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique, he was taken as a student by Louis Daguerre and became a collaborator on Daguerre's popular theatre dioramas.

After some time, he began to feel that he was not getting proper recognition, but chose to remain in the partnership, despite offers of permanent work in London during a trip to England. The break-up came when the French government awarded Daguerre an annual pension of 2,000 Francs for devising new techniques that Sebron felt were his ideas. He also claimed to have been entirely responsible for fourteen of the thirty dioramas created during his time with Daguerre. as well as several New York City landmarks including City Hall Park and Broadway. He also painted more than 60 portraits during this time.

He lived in Louisiana from 1850 to 1854. New Orleans Museum of Art curator Estill Curtis Pennington called Sebron's "Giant Steamboats on the Levee at New Orleans" "one of the first genuinely luminescent works to be painted in Louisiana," and praised the "masterful manipulation of luminism" in his painting "Crocodile Lake, Louisiana."

Nevertheless, he found that the demand for art in America was much less than in Europe and turned to painting portraits to make a living.

Upon returning to France in 1855, he still found himself unable to settle down, wandering throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, as far as Egypt, Istanbul and Syria, where he toured the ruins in 1870. He died in Paris on 1 September 1879.

Selected paintings