Charles Emile Carolus-Duran was a French painter. He came from a humble background and by the age of 11 was taking lessons at the Acadamie in Lille from the sculptor Augustin-Phidias Cadet de Beaupra (b 1800) who taught him to sketch.
At 15 he began a two-year apprenticeship in the studio of one of David's former pupils, Fran?ois Souchon (1787-1857), whose name he still referred to several years later when he exhibited at the Salon. In 1853 he moved to Paris. He copied in the Louvre where he must have met Henri Fantin-Latour, then taking life classes at the Acadamie Suisse (1859-60). He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1859. His first period in Paris, from 1853 to 1862 (interspersed with visits to Lille, where he received portrait commissions and an annuity in 1861), shows the influence of Gustave Courbet, whose After Dinner at Ornans (1849) he had been able to see in the Mus?e des Beaux-Arts at Lille. Thanks to Fantin-Latour or Zacharie Astruc, whom he had known in Lille, he soon befriended Courbet, Manet and the Realist artists, painting their portraits with a serious Realism full of concentrated energy: Fantin-Latour and Oulevay (1861), Zacharie Astruc (c. 1860-61; both Paris, Mus. d'Orsay) and Claude Monet (1867; Paris, Mus. Marmottan).
