FRANCAIS, FRANCOIS LOUIS French painter, was born at Plombieres (Vosges). After a few years of hard struggle, during which he made a precarious living by drawing on stone and designing woodcut vignettes for book illustration, he studied painting under Gigoux, and subsequently under Corot, whose influence remained decisive upon Francais's style of land scape painting. He exhibited first at the Salon in 1837 and was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 189o. Comparatively few of his pictures are to be found in public galleries, but his painting of "An Italian Sunset" is at the Luxembourg museum in Paris.