Mid 19th Century Miniature Portrait Madame Stuart by Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel, Framed

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This is a wonderful miniature portrait on thin wafer. It is of Madame Stuart signed and painted by Adolphe Alexandre … Read more This is a wonderful miniature portrait on thin wafer. It is of Madame Stuart signed and painted by Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel. On the back of the frame they wrote Lesret but it is Lesrel. We have researched his signature. He was a very famous painter.

Framed it is: 3 5/8" x 2 7/8"

Lesrel was twenty-two when he began his studies with the academic painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904). Like many aspiring painters, he hoped to follow in Gérôme’s footsteps as a history painter of scenes from ancient Greece and Rome. By 1861, however, Gérôme had already begun to expand his repertoire to include exotic scenes from Egypt and North Africa as well as genre scenes based on French historical eras. For the young Lesrel, the scope of work that his professor was exploring encouraged him to consider a broader range of subjects as well. In particular, Lesrel was fascinated with the work of an-Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891), whose meticulous, detailed historical subjects were beginning to redefine history painting as a form of documentary art. At the Exposition Universelle in 1867, Meissonier exhibited no less than fourteen paintings, an extremely successful venture and one that must have impressed Lesrel deeply.

After several years of study with Gérôme, and later with Meissonier, Lesrel made his Salon debut in 1865, launching a career that would bring him recognition and economic security for many years. In the late 1860s and 1870s, his painting was largely based on a romanticized vision of the Middle Ages See less