Biographical Information

CAROLUS-DURAN, the name adopted by the French painter Charles-Auguste-Emile Durand (1837-1917), who was born at Lille on the 4th of July 1837. He studied at the Lille Academy and then went to Paris, and in 1861 to Italy and Spain for further study, especially devoting himself to the pictures of Velazquez. His subject picture Murdered, or The Assassination (1866), was one of his first successes, and is now in thLille museum, but he became best known afterwards as a portrait painter, and as the head of one of the principal ateliers in Paris, where some of the most brilliant artists of a later generation were his pupils [such as the great American portrait painter, John Singer Sargent]. His Lady with the Glove (1869), a portrait of his own wife, was bought for the Luxembourg. In 1889 he was made a commander of the Legion of Honor. He became a member of the Academie des Beaux-arts in 1904, and in the next year was appointed director of the French academy at Rome in succession to Eugene Guillaume.

Source: Entry on the artist in the 1911 Edition Encyclopedia.