(b Marseille, 1 Sept 1823; d Paris, 24 Jan 1873). French painter. In 1840 he won a prize in life modelling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. His teachers were Augustin Aubert (1781–1857), who had been a student of Jacques-Louis David, and Pierre Bronzet. In Paris by 1843, he entered the studio of Léon Cogniet but spent little time there, for he had already embarked on his lifelong museum study of Old Master techniques, from which numerous remarkable copies still exist—for example Bathsheba after Rembrandt (1867; Paris, Louvre). Between 1844 and 1848 he travelled, first to the museums of Italy, where he discovered the colour of the Venetians, then to Belgium to see the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, to the Netherlands to see Rembrandt’s paintings, and finally to England for two years to study the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and Thomas Gainsborough. In the Salon of 1850 in Paris he exhibited a portrait of Mme Sabatier (priv. col, see Giraud, p. 88) that brought him recognition. He exhibited two portraits in 1853, seven in 1855 and ten in 1859, without further medals and with mixed reviews, and then did not exhibit in Paris again until 1872, when he exhibited a portrait of one of his biographers, Paul de Musset (Paris, Louvre). When at the request of his artist friends the government had offered him the rank of Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1865, Ricard refused; he had already become a reclusive, studious aesthete, leading a monastic existence in a quiet, darkened studio, surviving on an annuity from his family’s estate and on fees from his sitters.