Narcisse Diaz de la Pena
(b Bordeaux, 21 Aug 1807; d Menton, 18 Nov 1876).
French painter. After the death of his Spanish parents he was taken in by
a pastor living in Bellevue (nr Paris). In 1825 he started work as an
apprentice colourist in Arsène Gillet’s porcelain factory, where he
became friendly with Gillet’s nephew Jules Dupré and made the
acquaintance of Auguste Raffet, Louis Cabat and Constant Troyon. At this
time he executed his first oil paintings of flowers, still-lifes and
landscapes. Around 1827 Diaz is thought to have taken lessons from the
Lille artist François Souchon (1787–1857); perhaps more importantly, he
copied works by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon and Correggio in the Louvre, Paris,
and used their figures and subjects in such later paintings as Venus
and Adonis and the Sleeping Nymph (both Paris, Mus. d’Orsay).
He soon became the friend of Honoré Daumier, Théodore Rousseau and Paul
Huet. Diaz’s pictures exhibited at the Salon from 1831 to 1844 derive
from numerous sources, including mythology, as in Venus Disarming
Cupid (exh. Salon 1837; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay), and literature, as in
Subject Taken from Lewis’s ‘The Monk’ (exh. Salon 1834; possibly
the picture in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, entitled Claude Frollo
and Esmerelda). His other themes include a fantastical Orientalism
inspired by his admiration for Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps and Eugène
Delacroix, as in Eastern Children (Cincinnati, OH, Taft Mus.) and
such genre scenes as In a Turkish Garden (Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.);
these are all the more theatrical in that Diaz never travelled in the
East. Nevertheless, they display his skill as a colourist and his
ability to render light.
