Leon Bazille Perrault

Leon Bazille Perrault, also catalogued as Leon Jean Basile Perrault or Leon-Jean-Bazille Perrault, was born in 1832 in Poitiers, France. Sources disagree on the exact day of his birth, with different accounts giving 16 or 20 June 1832, so only the year and city are treated here as settled fact. He entered a communal school around age nine and the municipal drawing school of Poitiers around age ten, where he won local drawing competitions through his early teens. At fourteen he went to work for a decorative painter, taking part in the restoration of murals at the church of Sainte-Radegonde in Poitiers.

In his late teens Perrault won a municipal scholarship of 600 francs from the town of Poitiers to study in Paris, arriving in the early 1850s. He trained first in the atelier of Francois-Edouard Picot and later in the atelier of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He made his Salon debut in 1863 with religious subjects, including Christ au Tombeau and La Descente de Croix. He went on to receive an honorable mention in 1864, a second-class Salon medal in 1876, and further Salon recognition in 1878. During the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune he spent time in England, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in London in 1871. In 1873 he represented France as a diplomat of honor at international exhibitions in Vienna, London, and Philadelphia. He was named Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur in 1887, and won a bronze medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle and a silver medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, both in Paris. By the end of his career he exhibited hors concours, meaning he could show at the Salon without submitting to jury review.

Perrault died in 1908 in Royan, France. As with his birth, sources disagree on the exact day, with different accounts giving either 1 or 6 August 1908, so only the year and place of death are treated here as confirmed.

Perrault was consistently recognized within the official French Salon system rather than by outside critical movements, with medals in 1864, 1876, 1878, 1889, and 1900 and the Legion of Honor in 1887 marking a career built on institutional approval. The broader critical picture that emerges from period and later sources is of a technically accomplished, prize-winning academic painter whose reputation rested on skillful draftsmanship and appealing, sentimental subject matter rather than on innovation, a standing that has held steady rather than grown in the century since his death.

Perrault's auction market is thin but persistent. The highest documented price for his work is EUR 127,400 for the painting Out in the Cold (Un froid dehors), sold in 2010 above an estimate of EUR 75,000 to 112,500; the auction house and exact sale date are not confirmed in available sources. One market guide describes his auction results as generally ranging from about EUR 70 to that EUR 127,400 high, reflecting a market built on frequent, modest sales of drawings and smaller paintings alongside occasional larger prices for major Salon-scale works. No higher public sale has been identified in available sources. There is no current gallery or estate representation; his paintings and drawings pass through auction houses and specialist secondary-market dealers, among them Rehs Galleries in New York.

Perrault's market is small and dispersed rather than concentrated, with results ranging from modest sums for drawings to just above EUR 127,000 for his best paintings, so any single sale should be read against that wide range rather than as a trend line. There is no catalogue raisonne and no active estate or foundation, so provenance research and vetting through experienced auction houses and dealers matter more than they would for a living artist with institutional support. His steady presence in museum collections in France, Germany, and the United States is a mark of durable, if modest, historical standing, useful context for anyone weighing a work against its price.