1000 Museums

Narcisse Virgile Diaz was born in Bordeaux, France in 1807. His parents had left Spain to escape the Peninsular Wars, but both died before Diaz was 10 years old. Orphaned, he was sent to the home of a friend of his mother’s in Meudon, a suburb of Paris. In 1823, Diaz began an apprenticeship in painting porcelain at a factory. Weary of working at an industrial pace, Diaz sought out an art education independently. He began sketching at the Louvre, taking details from a wide variety of styles, from Italian Renaissance to French Neoclassicism, to add to his Romantic subjects. In 1833, Diaz took the first of his many yearly summertime trips to the Forest of Fontainebleau, where the Barbizon School—including Théodore Rousseau, Camille Corot, and Charles François Daubigny—had recently started gathering to paint the landscape en plein air. At the Salon of 1848, considered the moment of official recognition of the Barbizon school, Diaz won a first-class medal. Throughout his career, Diaz’s ability to efficiently produce and consistently sell his paintings gave him an income much steadier than his fellow artists at Barbizon. Diaz frequently aided these friends when they experienced financial hardship. When Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley began visiting the Forest of Fontainebleau in the early 1860s, Diaz welcomed them to Barbizon and lent support to their emerging Impressionist movement. Narcisse Virgile Diaz died in 1876 in the resort town of Menton.