Paul Huet met Eugène Delacroix sometime around 1822 at the Académie Suisse, an establishment run by the "Père Suisse," whose teaching methods were based on the study of live models. This was the beginning of a long friendship underscored by tremendous mutual esteem. At his death in 1863, Delacroix bequeathed a certain number of works by Poterlet, Monsieur Auguste and Charlet to Huet, and it was he who had the honor of giving the oration at Delacroix’s funeral. A champion of the romantic landscape and precursor of the École de Barbizon, Paul Huet started painting very early on in the countryside around Paris (Chaville, Bellevue, Fontainebleau) and in Normandy, the Auvergne, the Midi and the Pyrenees, in search of heroic landscapes and strange effects. Over the years, he developed a personal style that is more visible in the small format works painted directly from life (drawings, pastels, watercolors, sketches) than in the large compositions, which often lost some of their spontaneity in the studio.
French landscape painter, was born in Paris on Oct. 3, 1804. He forms a link between Georges Michel and Theodore Rousseau as one of the initiators of the "paysage intime" movement in France. His fiery, romantic tem perament led him to endow trees and natural objects with the emotions which he himself experienced, and his paintings of Na ture in her stormy aspects though admirably composed are apt to be over-dramatic in treatment.
