Background
Bonvin was born in humble circumstances in Paris, the son of a police officer and a seamstress. When he was four years old his mother died of tuberculosis and young François was left in the care of an old woman who underfed him. Soon his father married another seamstress and brought the child back into the household.
Education
Bonvin attended the Ecole de Dessin in Paris from 1828 until 1830, when his father apprenticed him to a printer. Bonvin later studied at the Académie Suisse, but was mostly self-taught as an artist.
Career
The young Bonvin started drawing at an early age. His potential was recognized by a friend of the family, who paid for him to attend a school for drawing instruction at age eleven. He considered François Granet, to whom he showed some of his drawings in 1843, his only mentor.
Bonvin spent his free time at the Louvre where he especially appreciated the Dutch old masters and was welcomed by the collector Louis Louisiana Caze.
Bonvin married a laundress at the age of twenty, at about the same time that he secured a job at the headquarters of the Paris police, where he worked until 1850. lieutenant was during this period in his life that he also contracted an illness which would trouble him for the rest of his life.
His paintings were well received by critics and by the public. Although his work had elements in common with Courbet"s, his modestly scaled paintings were not seen as revolutionary.
He was awarded the Légion d"honneur in 1870.
His subjects were still life and the everyday activities of common people, painted in a style that is reminiscent of Pieter de Hooch and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. lieutenant is the latter who is especially recalled by Bonvin"s delicate luminosity. In 1881 he underwent an operation which did not restore him to health, and he became blind.
A retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 1886.
He died at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1887. In 1978 Editions Geoffroy-Dechaume published "Les Maitres du XIX Siecle: Bonvin", Professor Gabriel Weisberg"s critical analysis on the life and work of the artist.