Françoise Duparc

Françoise Duparc, was a Spanish born Baroque painter who later lived in France. Françoise Duparc was born in Murcia, where her father Antoine Duparc, a French sculptor from Marseille, had settled and married a local Spanish woman. The family returned to Marseille in 1730, and Françoise was introduced to painting by her father and served her apprenticeship in the studio of Jean-Baptiste van Loo in Aix-en-Provence from 1742 to 1745. It is quite difficult to follow Duparc's course as she worked in different European cities: Paris and London, where she participated in two exhibitions in 1763 and 1766, and Wrocław where she spent time with one of her sisters Claire. She returned to Marseille in 1771 where she joined the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1776. She died shortly after October 2, 1778. Her estate inventory reported forty-one paintings that have not been found with the exception of the four paintings bequeathed by the artist to the city of Marseille, which is currently in the Musée des beaux-arts de Marseille. These tables whose style takes the humble realism of the Le Nain brothers are: Woman with Book, Tea Merchant, Old Woman and Man.