Bernard Louis Borione
Born 1865
Bernard Louis Borione was born in Paris in 1865. He was a pupil of his father and the artist Evariste Luminais and he specialised in painting genre subjects and interiors. The domestic antics of members of the higher echelons of the Roman Catholic Church exercised a powerful fascination for a number of popular painters and their patrons in the second half of the nineteenth century and in this Borione was no exception. As we can see here, these intimate portrayals of the life of the clergy are at once amusing and full of character but also highly skilful in execution. The use of Episcopal purple or crimson enhances the artist's palette and adds richness to an already sumptuous interior. Borione exhibited his paintings at the Salon des Artistes Francais and his works were as popular then as they are now.