Carle Vernet Biography

Antoine Charles Horace Vernet, better known as Carle Vernet (1758-1836), was a French painter, the youngest child of Claude-Joseph Vernet and the father of Horace Vernet.

Vernet was born in Bordeaux. At the age of five, he showed an extraordinary passion for drawing horses, but went through the regular academic course as a pupil of his father and of Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié. Strangely, after winning the Prix de Rome (1782), he seemed to lose interest in the occupation, and his father had to recall him from Rome to prevent his entering a monastery.

In his "Triumph of Aemilius Paulus", Vernet broke with tradition and drew the horse with the forms he had learnt from nature in stables and riding schools. His hunting pieces, races, landscapes, and work as a lithographer were also very popular.

When he again began to produce under the French Directory (1795-1799), his style had changed radically. He started drawing in minute detail battles and campaigns to glorify Napoleon. His drawings of Napoleon's Italian campaign won acclaim as did the Battle of Marengo, and for his Morning of Austerlitz Napoleon awarded him the Legion of Honour, and Louis XVIII awarded him the Order of Saint Michael. Afterwards he excelled in hunting scenes and depictions of horses.

He produced a painting Capture of Pamplona celebrating the 1823 Siege of Pamplona which he exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824.

In addition to being a painter and lithographer, Carle Vernet was an avid horseman. Just days before his death at the age of seventy-eight, he was seen racing as if he were a sprightly young man.