Antonin FANART

Antonin FANART, born on January 17, 1831 in Besançon (Doubs) and died in the same town on September 2, 1903, was a French painter. Born into a middle-class family in Besançon, Antonin Fanart left for Switzerland in 1849 to study art and painting in Geneva. A landscape painter, he traveled extensively in Switzerland, Savoy and Franche-Comté, regions from which he drew the subjects of many of his works. He held his first exhibition in Geneva in 1854, before exhibiting at the Paris Salon in 1857. Shortly afterwards, he founded a newspaper called Le Doubs, strongly opposed to the Second Empire. He became sub-prefect of Montbéliard when the Empire fell (1871). Antonin Fanart moved back to Besançon, where he was a town councillor, after his marriage in 1866. He founded the Palais Granvelle museum and the “Union comtoise des arts décoratifs” before dying of heart disease on September 2, 1903, in the city of his birth. A Besançon street bears his name, in the Montrapon-Fontaine-Écu district.