Louis Rémy Mignot

American, 1831 - 1870

BiographyLouis Rémy Mignot was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to French immigrant parents, Rémy and Elisabeth Mignot. Following the death of his mother, Louis joined the household of his grandparents, and decided to become an artist at a young age. Upon the death of his father in 1848, Mignot sailed to the Netherlands where he studied at The Hague Academy of Fine Arts with prominent Dutch landscape painter Andreas Schelfhout. In 1851 or 1852 in The Hague, Mignot met and befriended American painter Eastman Johnson, with whom he would collaborate on several paintings. Returning to the United States in 1855, Mignot moved to New York, where he became affiliated with the Hudson River School. He traveled to Mount Vernon with Johnson in 1857; in the same year he joined Frederic E. Church on Church's second painting expedition to Ecuador. Mignot was elected to New York's National Academy of Design in 1858, and became a full academician in 1859. He married Zairah Harris (known as Zaidee) of Baltimore in 1860, and their son, Rémy Granville, was born in Baltimore in 1861. Possibly a secessionist, after the Civil War began, Mignot sold numerous works at auction in June 1862, and departed for England in July 1862 with his family arriving separately. In London, he exhibited works at the Royal Academy, shipped paintings to New York for sale, and befriended fellow American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler. His paintings from the late 1860s suggest an awareness of the emerging Impressionist style. By 1870 he had traveled to Paris, where two landscapes were accepted in the annual Salon. Following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in that same year, he fled Paris for the English seaside city of Brighton, where he died, destitute, of smallpox, at 39.

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