Louis Desanges
(1822-1905)
23 December 1860

Volume 2, page 131, sitting no. 1824.

Louis William Desanges was a British painter of French descent. Born at Bexley in Kent in 1822, Desanges came from an aristocratic émigré family. He went to school in Kent and studied painting in France and Italy before settling in London in 1842. He was unsuccessful in the competition held in 1843 for the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament, and the Royal Academy rejected such ambitious works as The Excommunication of Robert, King of France, and his Queen, Berthe (untraced). He subsequently abandoned history painting for the more lucrative business of painting portraits of society ladies. His first work at the Academy, Portrait of an English Lady (1846, untraced), owed much to Ingres in its modelling and treatment of texture. Desanges was a member of the Association for the Free Exhibition of Modern Art in the late 1840s. He exhibited at the Royal Academy until 1877, though he did not receive any honours from that institution.

In the late 1850s he embarked on a series of portraits of soldiers and sailors who had been awarded the recently instituted Victoria Cross for their actions during the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny. The series was begun under the aegis of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), but was financed by the artist, who was presumably inspired by patriotic sentiments and a desire for recognition as a painter of important national subjects. The paintings, some 50 of them, were exhibited at the Egyptian Gallery in Piccadilly and later at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham in 1862. Numerous moves to acquire the collection for the nation failed. In 1900 the majority were acquired by Lord Wantage but they were later dispersed. Among the works from the collection now held at the National Army Museum, London, is Private Sims Winning the Victoria Cross, an idealized representation of a soldier saving the life of a superior officer.

[Source: The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols. published by Grove, 1996.]

On 30 October 1856 at St Marylebone Church in London he married Eleanor, daughter of Robert Ferner, Esq., of Fitzroy Square. 

For much of his life he resided at 16 Stratford Place in London, the small cul-de-sac off Oxford Street, now opposite Bond Street station.     

According to The Dictionary of Art, Desanges died circa 1887. Boase's Modern English Biography (supplement, published 1912), however, gives the date as 1890. In fact, the abstract of his will shows that he died on 2 October 1905 at Vine House, West Drayton, Middlesex. He left an estate valued at £2399.