Nicolas-Antoine Taunay

Born in 1755 to a chemist and enamel painter in Paris, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay trained with Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié aged 13, followed by Nicolas-Guy Brenet and Francesco Casanova. At the recommendation of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Taunay entered the Academy in 1784 and was sent by Count Angiviller (1730–1809) to Rome, where he made acquaintance with Jacques-Louis David and Louis Gauffier among others during his three-year stay. He became a founding member of the Institute de France upon its establishment in 1795. He was extremely popular among the upper class.

In 1816, a year after Napoleon’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Taunay was invited by the Portuguese King Dom João VI (1767–1826) to join a mission of French artists and scholars in Brazil. Taunay was appointed the mission’s landscape painter. Taunay painted just over 50 landscape paintings of Brazil, such as Entrada da baía e da cidade do Rio a partir do terraço do convento de Santo Antônio (1816, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro), providing an important record of Brazil on the cusp of its independence in 1822. He returned to France in 1824 while his four sons remained in Brazil; his son Félix became the director of the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes from 1834–1851, and Félix’s own son, Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay, would become one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers of the nineteenth century — the dynasty Nicolas-Antoine had inadvertently planted taking root in Brazilian literature as well as painting.