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Lerolle, Henry
(b Paris, 3 Oct 1848; d Paris, 22 April 1929). French painter and collector. He was initially a pupil of Louis Lamothe (1822–69) in 1864 but never went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Independent in outlook, he began working in the Louvre, where he met Albert Besnard and Jean-Louis Forain, and made copies after Nicolas Poussin, Veronese and Peter Paul Rubens. He attended the Académie Suisse and exhibited at the Salon from 1868. Having briefly been influenced by Henri Regnault, Lerolle painted works that owed much to the scenes of contemporary life by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Henri Gervex, Alfred Roll and Jean Charles Cazin, who introduced the taste for naturalistic observation, bright colouring and plein-air painting to the official Salons. At the Organ (exh. Salon 1885; New York, Met.) and At the Water’s Edge (1888; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.) disseminated in more accessible terms the still controversial innovations of Edouard Manet and the Impressionists. Lerolle’s concern for the structure of his compositions, in which the figures were sometimes off-centre, can be seen in his portraits, such as the Artist’s Mother (exh. Salon 1895; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay), whose spare, austere realism is reminiscent of Henri Fantin-Latour and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
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