Ary Scheffer. Ary Scheffer was a Dutch-French Romantic painter.
He was known mostly for his works based on literature, with paintings based on the works of Dante, Goethe, and Lord Byron, as well as religious subjects. He was also a prolific painter of portraits of famous and influential people in his lifetime.
Politically, Scheffer had strong ties to King Louis Philippe I, having been employed as a teacher of the latter's children, which allowed him to live a life of luxury for many years until the French Revolution of 1848. Scheffer was the son of Johan Bernard Scheffer, a portrait painter who was born in Homberg upon Ohm or Kassel and moved to the Netherlands in his youth, and Cornelia Lamme, a portrait miniature painter and daughter of landscape painter Arie Lamme of Dordrecht, for whom Arij was named.
Ary Scheffer had two brothers, the journalist and writer Karel Arnold Scheffer and the painter Hendrik Scheffer. His parents educated him and he attended the drawing academy in Amsterdam from the age of 11 years.
In 1808 his father became the court painter of Louis Bonaparte in Amsterdam, yet his father died one year later. Encouraged by Willem Bilderdijk, Ary moved to Lille, France for further study after the death of his father. In 1811 he and his mother, who greatly influenced his career, moved to Paris, France, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as a pupil of Pierre-Narcisse G