Agne-Louis-Guillaume Lesourd-Beauregard

Agne-Louis-Guillaume Lesourd-Beauregard (1800-1873) was a distinguished French painter and drawing master active in the first half of the nineteenth century, whose refined botanical and floral studies place him within the great French tradition of natural history illustration and flower painting. A most popular drawing master, Lesourd-Beauregard exhibited extensively at the Paris Salons and was awarded a medal in 1842.

He was a student of Gerard van Spaendonck, a renowned fruit and flower painter in France of the early nineteenth century. Van Spaendonck's rigorous attention to botanical accuracy, combined with a refined painterly touch, established a standard that Lesourd-Beauregard would carry forward through his own practice. This lineage placed him within the deep tradition of French flower painting that reached back through the great masters of the Ancien Régime and forward into the nineteenth century.

In 1840 Lesourd-Beauregard became Professor of Botanical Drawing at the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle, replacing the well-known artist and teacher Pierre-Joseph Redouté, whose celebrated volumes Les Roses and Les Liliacées remain among the most beloved works of botanical art ever produced. To be chosen as Redouté's successor was among the highest recognitions available to a French botanical painter of the period, and it confirmed Lesourd-Beauregard's standing at the very top of his field.

Working through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Lesourd-Beauregard produced accomplished flower paintings, botanical studies, and drawing instruction that shaped generations of French floral artists. His pictures are appreciated today as fine examples of the French botanical tradition at one of its most refined moments, and they can be found in French institutional and private collections devoted to the great tradition of European flower painting.