Emile Vernet-Lecomte (1821 - 1900)

There has always been a certain amount of confusion about the name of this artist, whose striking paintings have been shown in a number of recent European and American exhibitions. The son of the military painter Hippolyte Lecomte, who married Camille, daughter of the famous artist Carle Vernet, Emile Lecomte was therefore a nephew of the painter Horace Vernet. He studied with his uncle before initially showing at the Salon in 1843 under the name of Emile Lecomte. He later took the name of Vernet-Lecomte, with which he signed his paintings. The Salon catalogues, however, often inaccurate from the point of view of spelling, incorrectly listed his name for many years as Lecomte-Vernet before later inverting it.

This error has been repeated by many of the art dictionaries, as has the erroneous 1874 death date. Vernet-Lecomte painted a wide variety of subjects, including society portraits, religious paintings (many commissioned to decorate Paris churches and administration buildings) and pictures devoted to Orientalist themes. The first of these, Tete de Syrien (Portrait of a Syrian Man) and Femme syrienne (Syrian Woman), were shown at the 1847 Salon. Often featuring bold single figures of great beauty, they included Jeune fille syrienne jouant avec une panthere (Syrian Girl playing with a Panther), 1850, Femme fellah portant son enfant, Egypte (Fellaheen Woman carrying her Child, Egypt), 1864, Une Aimee, Egypte (Dancing Woman, Egypt), 1866, and Jeune fille maronite, Asie Mineure (Maronite Girl, Asia Minor), 1867. He also exhibited episodes of the siege of Sebastopol and the French expedition to Syria of 1860 after the massacre of Christians by the Druses. Although there are no details of his journeys,it seems more than likely that he actually travelled: an oil (sold at Drouot in 1976), painted in Cairo in 1863, and signed Emile Lecomte, shows a European artist sitting under a great tree while he sketches an encampment.

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