page_title: Philippe-Auguste Jeanron
section_title: Later career
hierarchical_section_title: Philippe-Auguste Jeanron / Later career
context_page_description: Philippe-Auguste Jeanron was a French painter, curator and writer. Throughout his life he was a passionate republican. His genre pictures typically depicted common people. He opposed the July Monarchy. After the February Revolution of 1848 was made head of National Museums and Director of the Louvre, where he introduced important innovations in the preservation, classification and arrangement of the collections. Later he became director of the museum in Marseilles.
context_section_description: When the provisional government took power after the February Revolution of 1848, the provisional government leader Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin nominated Jeanron as head of National Museums and Director of the Louvre.
  He retained the prestigious position of director of the Louvre from 1848 to 1850.
  One of Jenron's first priorities with the Louvre was to preserve the collection, and he hired guards for this purpose.
  He also made it a priority to improve the extremely poor conditions in which paintings were stored.
  Jeanron campaigned to include workers in completing the different sectors of the Louvre, hoping to spread the word that the museum was a place where all were welcome, and tried to obtain more space for the exhibits.
  Jeanron had a deliberately populist agenda. He displayed works by painters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and the Le Nain brothers who depicted plebeian subjects that would have greater appeal to the working class and the growing middle class, as opposed to the more aristocratic themes of painters like Hyacinthe Rigaud or Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
  Having struggled as an artist in the 1830s, Jeanron wanted the government to actively support new artists such as Charles Jacque and Jean-François Millet. He also clarified that the Musée du Luxembourg would be a museum of contemporary art, with constantly changing exhibits, while the Louvre would focus more on the past.
  Jeanron introduced the classification of painters by school, and made the first complete inventory of the collections. 
  He commissioned Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), whom he greatly admired, to complete the central composition of the Apollon gallery, which had been unfinished since the 17th century.
  Jeanron was replaced as director of National Museums by Émilien de Nieuwerkerke.
  In 1850 Jeanron became director of the Musée de Marseille.
  Jeanron published several memoirs and works of art criticism.
  After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Jeanron finally retired to his mansion at Comborn.
  He lived there for seven more years, suffering from poor health and poverty.
  He died at the Château de Comborn, Corrèze, on 8 April 1877. He is buried in the 42nd division of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
caption: The Hard-working Mother by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, in the Louvre collection
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