Literature

Jean Isy de Botton (born June 20, 1898, in Thessaloniki, Greece and died June 13, 1978, in New York City) was a French artist, ballet librettist and designer, lecturer, and teacher.

His parents were from Royan. In Paris, he studied classics at the Lycée Rollin and received a degree in philosophy. His parents intended a diplomatic career for him, but in 1920, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. He studied sculpture under Antoine Bourdelle and painting under Bernard Naudin. He studied also fresco painting and worked as an assistant to Paul Baudoüin. From 1925, he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and at the Salon d'Automne, becoming a member and serving on the Jury in 1929. He also exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries, the Salon des humoristes, and the Salon des artistes décorateurs.

In 1932, he was appointed Chef d'Atelier at the Académie Montmontre, where he taught until 1939. In 1936, he made his first trip to England, leading the exhibition France Nouvelle under the official patronage of the French government. The success of this show led to his Royal invitation the next year to be the only foreign painter to attend the coronation of King George VI in an official capacity and to paint numerous of the participants as well as "a canvas, thirty-foot long, depicting scenes of the coronation...to be placed in Windsor Castle."

After the war, de Botton became a naturalized citizen of the USA. He returned to France with a retrospective at the Wildenstein Gallery in Paris in 1956, followed the next year by a major exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, and thereafter spent half of each year in Paris and half in New York.

In the 1950s and 1960s de Botton became an international artist, with exhibitions in the United States including Philadelphia, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Palm Beach, Dallas, the University of Maine, and Adelphi University; in Europe, including London, Geneva, Osnabrück, Hamm, Cologne, Salzburg, Munich, Vienna, Monaco, Nice, and Paris.

His paintings were collected by Ernest Hemingway, Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, Jules Romains, Paul Valéry, and Charlie Chaplin.

Museums and public collections holding his works included the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Phoenix Art Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Albertina in Vienna, the Musée de l'Histoire de France at Versailles, and, in Paris, the Musée du Luxembourg, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, and the Centre national des arts plastiques.

De Botton was a member of the jury of the Salon d'Automne, member of the Salon des Tuileries, member of the Salon des Indépendants, workshop manager of the Académie Montmontre (in 1969), vice-president of the Salon Moderne, and president of the Salon France Nouvelle.