Charles-Caïus Renoux

Charles-Caius Renoux (born in Paris, 1795; died in Paris, 14 March 1846) was a French painter, lithographer, and illustrator. He first achieved success with paintings of medieval churches, particularly the ruins of cloisters and monasteries destroyed during the French Revolution, works for which he is still best known. Renoux also painted landscapes, large-scale battle scenes, and historical subjects, works which uniquely prepared him for the final phase of his career, the creation of spectacular dioramas, the “moving pictures” of the era. He also taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; his notable students included Narcisse Berchère and Hector Hanoteau. The contemporary scholar Alfred Maury gave this romantic but sparsely detailed account of Renoux’s early life and beginnings as an artist: M. Renoux was barely reaching his fifteenth year when he lost his master [teacher], the only one he had ever had; painting had for this very young man a powerful, indefinable attraction, which the violent opposition of his family could not erase. Desperate to overcome the antipathies of his parents, Renoux leaves the paternal roof; he travels through towns, visits monuments rich in masterpieces; from that moment on, his resolution was unshakable, and the day he took the palette to reproduce the interior of the church of Louviers and the casemates of Château Gaillard, that day, Renoux was able to exclaim with Correggio: "Anch io son pittore! And I too am a painter!" Maury does not name Renoux’s "only" master (teacher). Catalogues of the Paris Salons typically name a painter’s instructor, but never do so with Renoux. A newspaper of 1825 called him the "student and emulator" of Charles Marie Bouton and Louis Daguerre. Whether or not Renoux took formal instruction from them, these two older artists played an important role in his career. Whatever his training, by 1822, the year Renoux turned 27, his talents as a painter had attracted the patronage of the antiquarian Alexandre du Sommerard, whose collection of medieval art and artifacts would become the Musée de Cluny.