Ary Scheffer was a French painter and a representative of Romanticism.
Ary Scheffer came from a family of artists: his father, Johann Baptist Scheffer, who moved from Mannheim to Holland, was a painter, a student of August Tischbein; his mother, Cornelia Scheffer, née Lamme, was also a successful painter. Thanks to drawing lessons, especially from his father, the early artistic abilities of the young Ary were sufficiently developed; at the age of fifteen he painted a portrait, which was accepted to the Amsterdam art exhibition.

Having lost his father, Scheffer moved in 1811, together with his mother, to Paris, became a student of Pierre Guérin and under his guidance developed so quickly that in the following years he was able to participate in the Louvre salons.

During the first period of his activity, the young artist worked in the academic style of Guérin and most other French painters of that time, who had not yet parted with the principles of L. David, but nevertheless, depicting sacred, historical subjects, he apparently strove for pathos, dreaminess and sentimentality. During this period (1816-1827), he painted the following pictures: “The Death of Saint Louis” (1817), “Socrates Defending Alcibiades in the Battle of Potidaea” (1818), “The Patriotic Self-Sacrifice of the Six Citizens of Calais” (1819), “St. Louis, infected with the plague, visits the soldiers stricken with it” (1822; located in the Parisian church of St. Francis), “The soldier’s widow”, “The sailor’s family”, “The burnt farm”, “The recovering mother”, “Orphans in the cemetery”, “The little reaper”, “The old sergeant and the nurse”, “The return of the young invalid home” and many others.

All these paintings, more or less moderate in size, were repeatedly engraved and lithographed and brought the artist great popularity. In 1829, Scheffer traveled to the Netherlands, where he studied the old painters of this country, especially Rembrandt, whose influence was reflected in all his subsequent work.

From the time of this trip begins the second period of his work. And before that, inclined to romanticism, which had taken root in French painting, he now decisively joined its representatives, taking partly from the Gospel, partly from the works of poets (Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Burger, Dante) such subjects that provide the artist with the opportunity to create images and scenes that touch the soul of the viewer with the depth of thought and feeling embedded in them, and in terms of technique, he sometimes imitates Rembrandt, sometimes adheres to the manner of the old Italians and the modern German painters related to them.