User:Karenjc/Jules Contant

Jules Contant (23 April 1852 – 10 November 1920) was a French Impressionist painter and art collector.

Life and family
Contant was born in Blois, Loir et Cher, the son of Amédée Contant and Anne Louise Pauline Combannaire. He had one older and one younger sister, and a half-brother by his father’s first wife who died in 1854 at the age of nine. He attended school in Blois, and showed an early preference for painting and drawing over other subjects.

In December 1870 Contant witnessed the death of his father Amédée, a town councillor, during the Franco-Prussian war. The only one of the Mayor’s assistants remaining in town, Amédée Contant had gone to the mayor’s office accompanied by his son and his nephew Jules Gueritte. The invading Prussians had advanced as far as Beaugency and were already on the river’s left bank. Amédée brought the few remaining councillors together and the decision to surrender the town was made in order to avoid civilian casualties. Leaving the mayor’s office under a white flag, he was caught by workers making a barricade and accused of cowardice. Infuriated, he tore a rifle from their hands and fired at the Prussians, and was killed when they returned fire.

Diagnosed with a lung complaint, Contant went to live in Paris on medical advice. The disposal of his late father’s estate brought him a modest income, allowing him to study fine art, although he also worked for a time at the Printemps department store. He spent his evenings in Montmartre in the company of other artists, notably Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who became a friend and who painted him three times.

Contant returned to Blois in around 1878. He served one term as a town councillor, then founded a socialist-leaning newspaper, Le Républicain du Loir-et-Cher, with his cousin Jules Gueritte. There was a controversy over the paper’s coverage of the elections of September 1881, in which three deputies complained that they had been misrepresented, and the newspaper did not last long. Another business venture, a “regatta society”, failed because all the expense of the project fell on Contant.

His main occupation was as a painter, and he was well enough known for the conservator of the Château de Blois to entrust him with the decoration of the rotunda of the Gaston d’Orléans room, the venue for the most important balls of the season, in conjunction with two other artist friends, Henri Sauvage and Henri Touraine. (Sauvage painted a magnificent portrait of Content’s mother.)  Catalogues of the period list him as an exhibitor in Paris on a number of occasions. On 2 July 1900, in Paris, he married Françoise Pradel, 20 years his junior. Known as Francine, his wife came from a rich Lyon family, had a comfortable private income, and had previously been married to a Paris lawyer, René Ribour, whom she divorced after five years of marriage. A singer and pianist of some talent, Pradel was introduced to the confirmed bachelor Contant by mutual friends and fell rapidly in love. They had one son, Jacques (22 August 1901 – 12 August 1938).

Mme Contant’s fortune gave the couple a pleasant and comfortable life. They usually spent the autumn in their own Paris apartment and winter in Cagnes-sur-Mer in a house next door to “Les Colettes”, the home of the Renoir family, whose children were a similar age to their own son. Spring was spent in Blois, and summer at Pont-Aven in Brittany. Francine Contant died on 20 December 1914. Her husband continued his painting and his involvement in the art world of the time. He collected many works by important artists, including six by Renoir. He died on 10 November 1920.