Travelling peasants with their cattle and sheep in a landscape; and Figures with animals outside an inn beside a wheat field

Jean-Louis Demarne was born in Brussels but moved to Paris at the age of twelve following the death of his father, an officer under the Emperor of Austria. In the French capital Demarne was trained as a history painter with Gabriel Briard; however, failing to win the coveted Prix de Rome in 1772 and 1774, he turned to the popular fields of landscape and genre painting, particularly in the manner of the Dutch masters Aelbert Cuyp and Adriaen van de Velde, who were much in demand in eighteenth-century Paris. Demarne was agréé in 1783 by the Académie Royale, where he exhibited at its official Salon in addition to the Salon de la Correspondance and the Exposition de la Jeunesse. Among his favorite subjects were village fairs and road scenes vivified by charming anecdotes. Apolitical in nature, Demarne was professionally unaffected by the French Revolution, and his paintings were aggressively collected in the early nineteenth century by, among others, the Empress Josephine and members of Russia's aristocracy.