Camille Jacques François Clere (1825 – 1919) - Domenica

Camille Jacques François CLERE
(Anzin, 1825 – Paris, 1919)

Domenica

Oil on panel
Titled « DOMENICA » lower right
Signed and dated lower left
27 x 21 cm
1865

Pupil of Cogniet at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he entered in 1847, Clere started at the Paris Salon in 1848. He won second prize at the Rome competition in 1855 with César in the boat. The artist then traveled to Rome, where he was a member of the group of French artists created in 1861 and called the Caldarrosti. It was probably on his return from his Italian journey that Clere painted, from a drawing taken on the motif, our young Italian named Domenica.
Obviously, the artist pushed his trip to Naples and its surroundings; the hairstyle presented by our model being Neapolitan. It was with a sending of Neapolitan paintings that Clere began her cycle of Italian paintings at the Salon in Paris and the provinces. In fact, in 1859, he sent the Young Peasants from the Naples campaign. The artists will exhibit in Paris his last Italian subject in 1868 to focus only on the portrait, the last of which will be presented in 1904.

It should be noted that Clere exhibited at the Salons de Lyon several paintings of an ethnographic character of the same type as that presented here, for example Pasaccia, Michelina (1867), Pascuccia-Ciociara (1873) or Pasqua-Maria (1874).

Clere was also regularly received and rewarded in the other French Salons such as Nantes (Gold medal in 1862), Rouen (Bronze medal in 1866), Le Havre ...

Museums : Cambrai, Douai, Anzin, Valenciennes…