Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ was the descendant of a noble Piedmontese family that settled in France in the fourteenth century. In 1861, at age nineteen, he entered the studio of Charles Gleyre (1808-1874) and two years later trained under the guidance of Émile Signol (1804-1892). With his fascination for historical and exotic subjects in mind, Lecomte du Nouÿ entered the studio of Gérôme (q.v.) in 1864. Lecomte du Nouÿ began exhibiting at the Salon in 1863 and received his first critical approval two years later for Le sentinel grec (1865), based on the tragedy Oresteia (458 BC) by Aeschylus. One year later he won a gold medal for another classical subject, Invocation de Neptune (1866, Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille), which exempted him from jury approval for future Salons. In 1865 Gérôme encouraged him to join Félix Clément (1826-1888) on a trip to Egypt, as the latter had received a commission to decorate the Choubrah Palace of Prince Halim near Cairo. The Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) meant hardship for many artists, including Lecomte du Nouÿ who struggled to get by without commissions. In 1872 he won the Second Prix de Rome and received a good deal of attention at the Salon with Les porteurs de mauvaises nouvelles (Ministère de Affaires Culturelles, Tunis), which was bought by the state for the Musée du Luxembourg. That same year the French government asked him to go to Venice to copy The Marriage of St. Ursula by Carpaccio for the École des Beaux-Arts. Three years later he painted an altarpiece for the chapel of St.-Vincent-de-Paul in the church of La Trinité in Paris. He traveled throughout his life and, in 1875, embarked on an extensive voyage to Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and Asia Minor. Twenty years later, on his way to Constantinople, he stopped in Bucharest in order to visit his brother, André Lecomte du Nouÿ (1844-1914), who was a court architect. He ended up staying several years, as he received commissions for portraits of members of the royal family and frescoes in Romanian churches. Throughout his career, Lecomte du Nouÿ painted many religious and history paintings; he was also a prolific portraitist and sculptor. In 1875 he married Mlle Peigné-Crémieux, who died soon afterward; in 1891 he married Caroline Evrard.
