Champfleury

Jules François Félix Husson, known as Jules Champfleury, was a French novelist and art critic born in Laon in 1821 and who died in Sèvres in 1889. A champion of Realism in painting and fiction, he is a useful guide to how that movement was defended in nineteenth-century France, when it still had to win its place.

He moved to Paris in 1843, where he befriended Baudelaire, Banville, Courbet and Nadar. That same year he began writing art criticism for L'Artiste under the pen name he would make his own. He was among the first to champion Gustave Courbet and, in 1856, he argued for El Greco at a time when the Spanish school was still largely overlooked. As a critic he also revived interest in the Le Nain brothers and Maurice Quentin de La Tour. His fiction, including short stories and novels such as The Bourgeois of Molinchart (1854), is counted among the earliest Realist works.

From 1872 until his death he was in charge of the collections at the Sèvres porcelain factory. He is still remembered today for Les Chats (1869), a collection of essays on cats illustrated with drawings by leading artists of the day. His legacy rests mainly on his advocacy of Realism and on his role as a bridge between writers and painters of his era.