Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant

Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845-1902) was born in Paris and became one of the most celebrated French painters of the second half of the nineteenth century, admired equally for his Orientalist canvases and for the society portraits that made him a favorite of European royalty. Constant spent his youth as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, where he won a municipal prize that allowed him to enter the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1866. The following year he entered the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, one of the most influential academic painters of his day, and his first appearance at the Salon de Paris came in 1869.

With the declaration of war in 1870, Constant enlisted. After the war, instead of returning to the Academy, he began to travel, starting out in Spain and then following his mentor Charles Tissot to Morocco. From this point on he abandoned history painting for Orientalist subjects. At the Salon of 1875, he received a third place medal for his painting Moroccan Prisoners, and the following year a second place medal for his Mohammed II in Constantinople. In 1876 he also produced a portrait of Emmanuel Arago and then married one of his daughters. At the Exposition Universelle of 1878, he obtained a third place medal and was later decorated with the Legion of Honor.

By 1880, Constant had moved from Orientalist subjects toward portraiture and more decorative work. He received a commission to paint the ceiling of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris with a composition depicting Paris Conquering the World. He was also commissioned to paint allegorical figures of les belles lettres et les sciences for the Sorbonne, and to paint the ceiling of the Opéra-Comique. Later he painted portraits of Queen Victoria and Queen Alexandra, and for much of the latter part of the nineteenth century he was the favorite portraitist of English high society.

Constant was elected to the Institut de France in 1893 and was eventually decorated as a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, one of the highest recognitions available to a French artist. He was also one of the most influential teachers of his generation. Working through his own atelier and later at the Académie Julian in Paris, he trained a remarkable roster of international students, including a number of important American painters such as Frederick Frieseke and Robert Henri, who carried his lessons back to the United States. Constant died in Paris in 1902. His paintings are held in major French museums and in significant international collections, where they remain among the most vivid documents of both the Orientalist tradition and the world of late nineteenth-century society portraiture.