(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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Louis Rémy Mignot was born on 3 February 1831, at Charleston, South Carolina, and was probably the son of Remy Mignot, a confectioner, who for a time conducted the French Coffee House in Charleston. The Mignots had been ardent Bonapartists and had left France at the time of the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815.
Louis Mignot's boyhood was spent in the home of his wealthy grandfather near his birthplace. He manifested a marked love of art while a mere child, and at seventeen he had definitely chosen his career. He passed through a course of drawing with credit, and in 1851, at the age of twenty, he traveled to Holland and became the pupil of Andreas Schelfhout, the landscapist, at The Hague. His progress was rapid.
Mignot began to work from nature, making trips to several European countries for sketching purposes, and remained about four years. Returning to the United States in 1855, he opened a studio in New York, where his success was immediate and complete. At that time Frederick E. Church's spectacular pictures of the Andean peaks and jungles were in high favor. He had made one trip to Ecuador in 1853 and was planning to make another in 1857. Mignot, whose admiration for the work of his senior colleague was fervent, and who was deeply interested in tropical scenery, gladly accepted the opportunity offered him to accompany Church on this second voyage to Guayaquil. The two painters, actuated by the same enthusiasm for the stupendous scenes among the Andes, made the most of their time in Ecuador, and brought home studies made at Quito and Riobamba which were destined to bring both of them notice. It was not unnatural that Mignot should have worked much in the spirit of Church, and that some of his tropical landscapes should have resembled those of the elder man. His own native talent and facility, however, appear to have been quite generally recognized by his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic. Mignot was made an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1858 and a year later became an academician. He collaborated with his friend T. P. Rossiter, the historical painter, in making one of the latter's series of Mount Vernon scenes, "Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, " in which it is evident that Mignot's part consisted of the landscape background. The picture belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. On the outbreak of the Civil War, Mignot's Southern sympathies made his further stay in New York so repugnant to his feelings that on June 26, 1862, he set sail for England on board the Great Eastern. A few days prior to his departure he had sold a collection of his paintings at Leeds' auction-room for a total of something over $5, 000. He made his way to London, where he remained, for the most part, during the remainder of his life, and where he was as successful as he had been in New York. He was a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy, and among the landscapes shown there in the sixties were several noteworthy Ecuadorian subjects painted from the studies made in 1857 the "Lagoon of Guayaquil, " "Evening in the Tropics, " "Under the Equator, " and "Mount Chimborazo. " In 1870 he was in France, and, either by accident or design, was shut up in Paris during the siege. He died of smallpox at Brighton, shortly after his return to England. He was only thirty-nine years old. His collected works were exhibited in London soon after his death and elicited favorable attention.
(Landscape painter Louis Remy Mignot (1831-1870) was accla...)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
a member of the National Academy of Design
Among Mignot's close friends was the diarist George Templeton Strong. For all his talent, perseverance, and brilliant connections, Mignot died destitute, his estate valued at less than £20. The artist still lies in an unmarked grave in Brighton.
Mignot's widow returned to Paris after the fall of the Commune and retrieved her husband's paintings from his studio. In 1876 she organized a benefit exhibition and sale of his pictures in London. It was the artist's last solo exhibition for 120 years. Having left New York just as his career was taking off and dying before he could firmly reestablish himself in either London or Paris, Mignot quickly fell into the obscurity of a footnote. His first and so far only retrospective exhibition was organized in 1996 by the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. The exhibition was accompanied by a monographic book, "The Landscape Paintings of Louis Rémy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad, " by Katherine E. Manthorne with contributions by John W. Coffey and David Moltke-Hansen (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). The book includes biographical and interpretive essays as well as an illustrated checklist of 102 paintings and a detailed chronology. It remains the most complete study of this remarkable American artist.
Mignot's marriage on January 11, 1860, to Zairah Cordelia Harris of Baltimore was a newsworthy event. Fellow landscape painter John F. Kensett stood as best man. Zairah Harris (1831-1880), known as Zaidee, was the daughter of Dr. Chapin Aaron Harris (1806-1860), one of the pioneers of modern dentistry and a notable Baltimore art patron. Louis and Zaidee had one child, Rémy Granville, born in Baltimore, December 27, 1861.
