Claude Simpol

Claude Simpol, Claude Saint-Pol or Claude Saint-Paul was a French painter.

Born in Clamecy, he studied under Boullogne and frère Luc. He was admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc on 23 March 1695 and won several prizes (including the second prize in the 1687 prix de Rome for Noah's Flood) at the Académie royale, to which he was admitted on 30 April 1701. Specialising in grisailles, he was listed on 2 March 1709 as still not having provided his academy work, whose subject was Neptune's Dispute with Minerva, or the Naming of the City of Athens.

He was described by Pierre-Jean Mariette as an artist who had "little love for work" and who adopted "bad conduct, which continually forced him to struggle with need:. Even so, he produced paintings for the menagerie at the Palace of Versailles in 1702 and 1703 and produced a May for Notre-Dame in Paris in 1704 (Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary, now in the Musée des beaux-arts d'Arras).

He also produced several drawings to be engraved and a teaching model for a polisher in Paris. He also worked for the publisher Jean Mariette, who commissioned fashion plates, pastoral scenes and religious images from him. These include a set of twelve scenes of rural subject matter, once thought to be by Jacques Stella, representing the months, and a number of illustrations for Les Vies des SS. Pères des déserts d'Orient published in 1711. He died in Paris.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023