Théodule Ribot 1823-1891
The son of a civil engineer from the Eure department, Théodule Ribot received his earliest technical training in geometric drawing before entering the École des Arts et Métiers in Châlons. His father’s premature death in 1840 forced him to abandon his studies in order to support his family.
He initially worked with decorative painters before settling in Paris in 1845, where he was employed as an assistant in the studio of Auguste-Barthélemy Glaize. After spending the years between 1848 and 1851 in Algeria supervising construction work, he returned to Paris and endured difficult living conditions. He produced industrial drawings and copies after Watteau for the American market, while painting for himself in his spare time.
A passionate admirer of Courbet, Ribera, Rembrandt and the Spanish masters, Ribot participated in the celebrated private exhibition of the “Refusés” in 1859 alongside Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, James McNeill Whistler and François Bonvin. This event anticipated the official Salon des Refusés of 1863.
His true recognition came in 1861, when he exhibited at the Salon for the first time. His kitchen and farmyard scenes impressed critics with their powerful realism and dramatic chiaroscuro inspired by the seventeenth-century masters.
Awarded medals at the Salons of 1864 and 1865, and at the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition, Ribot was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour that same year before being promoted to Officer in 1887. Following the destruction of a large proportion of his work during the Franco-Prussian War, he settled permanently in Colombes in 1871, where he produced the greater part of his œuvre.
Although illness gradually forced him to abandon painting, his reputation continued to grow. In 1884, his friends Fantin-Latour, Boudin, Bastien-Lepage, Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin and Monet organised a banquet in honour of the man they regarded as a true “independent artist”.
The father of the painter Germain-Théodore Ribot, Théodule Ribot died in 1891, leaving behind a body of work of profound sincerity, now regarded as one of the most personal and powerful expressions of French Realism.