André Léon Larue, called Mansion

Mansion came from a family of ebenists and received his first painting lessons from his father Jacques Larue. The young man moved from Nancy to Paris in 1804 to learn miniature painting from lsabey, who, like him, was from Nancy and with whom he lived for a time. Between 1808 and 1824 he exhibited at the Paris Salon and was honored with awards in 1819 and 1822. He also received a silver medal for his works exhibited in Douai in 1825. In 1833 he participated in the first exhibition of the Société Lorraine des Amis des Arts et des Musées, and in 1829 and 1831 he exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. As an artist, Mansion was extraordinarily versatile: he painted portrait miniatures on ivory and enamel, worked for the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, colored lithographs as well as costume representations of the English army, painted in oils, and was also active as a photographer. His theoretical treatise on miniature painting "Lettres sur la miniature" was published in 1823 in French and English. Mansion's students included Jean-Pierre Robelot, Paul Gomien et Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, called Grandville. His older sister Catherine Sophie (1778–1830) was also a miniaturist. Mansion was married three times. His first wife was Jeanne Louise Foubert. After her death in 1817, he married his pupil Mary Brian in 1823 and Marie Catherine Goossens, a sculptress from Brussels, in 1852. In the second half of his life, Mansion worked in England, primarily in London. Together with Samuel Louis Eschauzier, he founded a printing and lithography business, which was dissolved in 1833. The artist died in 1870 in his apartment in the London district of Shoreditch. (Important elements of the artist's biography and the year of his death were kindly communicated to us by Henry-Noel Canival, Paris, June 2023).