DELAROCHE, HIPPOLYTE, commonly known as PAUL, French painter, was born in Paris on July 17, He studied under Gros and exhibited for the first time in the Salon of 1822. He visited Italy in 1838 and 1843, when his father-in-law, Horace Vernet, was director of the French Acad emy. His studio in Paris was in the rue Mazarin, where he never spent a day without some good result, his hand being sure and his knowledge great. His subjects, definitely expressed and popu lar in their manner of treatment, illustrating certain views of history dear to partisans, yet romantic in their general interest, were painted with a firm, solid, smooth surface, which gave an appearance of the highest finish. Delaroche held a course midway between the classicists and the romanticists. His long series of historical pictures had a great popular success and were made familiar in thousands of homes by engravings of them. Three of them are in the Louvre: "The Death of Queen Elizabeth" (1827), "The Children of Edward IV." (183o), and "The Young Martyr." But his easel pictures no longer have much importance.
In 1837 Delaroche received the commission for the great pic ture, 27 metres long, in the hemicycle of the lecture theatre of the tcole des Beaux-Arts. This represents the great artists of the modern ages assembled in groups on either hand of a central elevation of white marble steps, on the topmost of which are three thrones filled by the architects and sculptors of the Parthenon. To supply the female element in this vast composition he intro duced the genii or muses, who symbolize or reign over the arts, leaning against the balustrade of the steps. The portrait figures are nearly all unexceptionable and admirable. This great and successful work is on the wall itself, an inner wall, however, and is executed in oil. It was finished in 1841 and considerably injured by a fire which occurred in 1855, which injury he immediately set himself to remedy (finished by Robert-Fleury) ; but he died before he had well begun, on Nov. 4, 1856.
See L. Runtz, Oeuvre de Paul Delaroche, photographic reproductions, with a notice by H. Delaborde and Jules Godde (1858) . Rees, Delaroche (188o) .