GUERIN, PIERRE NARCISSE, BARON French painter, was born at Paris on May a pupil of Jean Baptiste Regnault. "Marcus Sextus" (Louvre), exhibited at the Salon of 1799, brought him before the public and excited en thusiasm partly due to the subject,—a victim of Sulla's proscrip tion returning to Rome to find his wife dead and his house in mourning—in which an allusion was found to the actual situation of the emigres. In 1802 Guerin produced "Phaedra and Hippo lytus" (Louvre) ; in 1810, after his return to Paris from Rome where he studied two years he again achieved a great success with "Andromache and Pyrrhus" (Louvre). Guerin's success was ensured by the skilful selection of highly melodramatic situations, treated with the strained and pompous dignity proper to the art of the first empire. He died on July 16, 1833.
See Julius Meyer, Geschichte der franzosischen Malerei (1867).