Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre (1806 – 1874) – Swiss artist and teacher, representative of academicism.

Orphaned at the age of eight or nine, Charles Gleyre was taken by his uncle to Lyon and sent to a factory school. In the mid-1820s, he arrived in Paris and studied painting intensively for several years, then left France for almost ten years. Gleyre spent several years in Italy, where he became close, in particular, with Horace Vernet and Louis-Léopold Robert, and then went to Greece and further east, visiting Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. Returning to Paris by the end of the 1830s, Gleyre began to work intensively, and his first painting that attracted attention appeared in 1840 (The Vision of Saint John). It was followed by Evening (1843), a large-scale allegory that won a silver medal at the Paris Exhibition and was later known as Lost Illusions.

Despite a certain success, Gleyre rarely participated in competitive exhibitions in the future. He was extremely demanding of himself, worked on his paintings for a long time, but left a total of 683 works, according to the posthumous catalogue, including sketches and drawings, including, in particular, a portrait of Heine, used for an engraving in the magazine Revue des Deux Mondes (April 1852). Among the most significant works in Gleyre’s legacy are the paintings Earthly Paradise (which Hippolyte Taine spoke enthusiastically about), The Flood, Odysseus and Nausicaa, The Prodigal Son and other canvases on ancient and biblical subjects.

Almost as famous as his own painting, Gleyre was a teacher to whom Paul Delaroche handed over his students in the mid-1840s. Sisley, Renoir, Monet, Whistler and other outstanding artists studied in Gleyre’s studio at various times.