Antoine Berjon (1754–1843),

• Was a French painter and designer.
• He worked in a variety of media including oil, pastel, watercolour, and ink.

• Berjon was born in St Pierre de Vaise, a commune of Lyon, to the son of a butcher.

• Berjon first studied drawing with the local sculptor Antoine-Michel Perrache.

• He went to work as a designer of textiles in Lyon's important silk industry until its collapse with the French Revolution. 

• Berjon's paintings from the 1780s are untraced.

• In 1791, the Paris Salon accepted four of his works, including Still Life of Peaches and Grapes.

• He visited Paris often in the early 1790s and moved there in 1794.

• He became a friend of Jean-Baptiste-Jean Augustin, a painter of miniatures, and of Claude-Jean-Baptiste Hoin, a portraitist.

• Living in Paris for 17 years, he exhibited at the Salon at least five times. 

• By the time of his return to Lyon in 1810, his reputation had increased, and he became the professor of flower design at the newly established École des Beaux-Arts, which had been founded by Napoleon's decree in 1807 to revive Lyon's silk industry.

• He was dismissed in 1823 after a 13-year appointment, replaced by his gifted pupil Augustin Thierrat.

• He set up his own studio in Lyon, giving private instruction, and continued to make art for the last two decades of his life.

• He died in Lyon at 89.

• Next