Hilaire Ledru (1769–1840)

• Was a French painter.
• The son of a poor carpenter, Nicolas Philippe Ledru, and Anne Joseph Barbier, Hilaire Ledru herded flocks during his youth.

• He learned to read on his own, and early showed a singular aptitude for the art of drawing.

• Lacking pencils, because of his poverty, he began to write and draw on the dust with a stick and then to char portraits on the whitewashed walls of his father's house. 

• The lord of the place, Delahaye de Gricourt, having found his talent promising, placed him at the Academy of Drawing in Douai where he had as his teacher the painter Caullet.

• There he made rapid progress and then went to Paris to complete serious studies in painting.

• Ledru was a friend of Joseph Lesurques — another Douaisian — and was heard as a witness for the defense in the first trial of the Lyon courier affair in 1796.

• He painted the last meeting between Lesurques and his family before his execution. 

• He returned to Douai to marry Marie-Anne Durand.

• After his death at boulevard Poissonnière, he was buried in the Montmartre cemetery. 

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