Background
Paul Cornoyer was born on August 15, 1864 at St. Louis, Missouri, United States. He was the son of Charles and Marie (Barada) Cornoyer, both of French descent.
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Paul Cornoyer was born on August 15, 1864 at St. Louis, Missouri, United States. He was the son of Charles and Marie (Barada) Cornoyer, both of French descent.
Paul began to draw and paint as a young boy, and at seventeen he entered the St. Louis School of Art whose director, Halsey C. Ives, befriended and encouraged him. While continuing his art education Cornoyer did reporting for the St. Louis Republic, having secured a position through Augustus Thomas, then a newspaper writer.
In 1889, thanks in part to commissions from appreciative fellow townsmen, Cornoyer had accumulated funds sufficient to assure him several years’ study at Paris. He entered the Julian Academy where he had criticisms from Jules Lefebvre and Benjamin Constant.
Cornoyer exhibited in the Salon in Paris in the early 1890s and in 1894 he returned to St. Louis. About 1894 he sent his canvas to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts which was seen, admired, and bought by the painter William M. Chase. The purchase led to the correspondence in which Cornoyer was urged by his older confrere to settle in New York City. Cornoyer followed this advice and became in 1899 an instructor at the Mechanics’ Institute where he proved himself an able and inspiring teacher.
He held summer painting classes at first in Connecticut and then on the Massachusetts North Shore. His own creative work of his best period included many New York street scenes which he rendered with an acute appreciation of the picturesqueness of rainy day effects, of dully gleaming pavements, and of the intermingling of natural and artificial lights. He also did notable decorations, of Italianate and other subjects, such as those for the Planters’ Hotel, St. Louis, and the residences of W. B. Thompson, Yonkers, New York, and Francis J. Oakes, Brookline, Massachusetts.
He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1909. In 1917 he decided to make his permanent residence at East Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he had remodeled an old house to provide a commodious and attractive studio. He is represented by characteristic street scenes in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the City Art Museum of St. Louis, and the Dallas Art Association.
Paul Cornoyer was best known for his painting of New York City. In 1892 he won the first prize of the American Art Association of Paris and in 1895 the gold medal of the St. Louis Association of Painters and Sculptors. He was also noted as a moving spirit in the formation of the North Shore Arts Association.
Cornoyer was a vice-president of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Cornoyer was a friendly, helpful man, greatly beloved by his fellow artists.
