The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Fichel, Eugène

FICHEL, fē-shel, Eugène, French painter: b. Paris, 30 Aug. 1826; d. there, 2 Feb. 1895. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1844 and became a pupil of Delaroche, but painted very much more under the inspiration of Meissonier, whose exquisite handling is suggested in numerous small canvases of his which by their refined technique and vivid action recall the characteristic intensity and directness of composition which belong to the painter of ‘Friedland.’ The principal works of Fichel are of a high order of genre, and include, ‘The End of Dinner’; ‘A Festival in the Year 1776’; ‘The Capture of a Spy’; ‘The Wandering Singers,’ etc., and the following historic pictures, which have the freedom and imagination of pure genre: ‘The Night of August 24, 1572’; ‘Founding of the French Academy.’ He was a chevalier of the Legion of Honor and, in 1857, received a medal for his painting in the Salon of that year. In the latter he exhibited a canvas every year, up to a few years before his death. Many of his pictures are in galleries all over the world. Two of his paintings, ‘A Violin Player,’ executed in 1871, and ‘Awaiting an Audience,’ painted in 1881, are in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Consult Montrosier, E., ‘Les Artistes Modernes’ (Vol. IV, Paris 1884).