Hilaire Pader (1617-1677)

Aliases: Ilario Pader

Professions: Painter; Etcher

• Hilaire Pader Sold at Auction

Hilaire Pader Biography

(b Toulouse, 24 Feb 1617; d 14 Aug 1677). French painter, engraver and writer. He became a pupil of Jean Chalette in 1632; it was probably at the end of his apprenticeship in 1635 that he travelled to Rome, where he completed his studies with Niccolò Tornioli, painter to Cardinal Maurice of Savoy. He then returned to Toulouse, where between 1642 and 1643 he completed the portraits of the capitoul s (municipal magistrates of Toulouse) left unfinished by Chalette. He was not, however, appointed official painter to the Capitole (Capitol of Toulouse), and his relations with the capitouls were always strained. In the late 1640s Pader went to Monaco, where he worked for Prince Honoré II (reg 1612–62). In 1649 he published a translation of the first book of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura (1584) as Traité de la proportion naturelle et artificielle des choses , with plates engraved by himself; he dedicated it to Cardinal Maurice of Savoy. Apart from brief periods in Toulouse, he remained in Monaco, working for Honoré II, until 1655; his most notable work was an altarpiece of St Sebastian (untraced). He dedicated his La Peinture parlante (1653), a treatise on the second book of Lomazzo’s Trattato , to his patron, and continued to work for him even after returning to Toulouse. Pader aspired to membership of the Académie Royale in Paris, and in 1657 dedicated to it the second edition of La Peinture parlante . He was approved (agréé) in 1659 and received (reçu) as a member in 1660, having proposed but not executed a morceau de réception on the subject of ‘Universal Peace under the Reign of Augustus’. He had by then settled in Toulouse, where he worked in the Capitole , copying, in a desperately provincial style, all the portraits in drawings (1664); he also tried, without success, to establish an independent school of drawing.

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