Charles Paul Landon (; 12 October 17605 March 1826) was a French painter and popular writer on art and artists.
Life and work
Landon was born in Nonant-le-Pin and entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste Regnault, where he made a lifelong friendship with Robert Lefèvre. He and won the first prize of the academy in 1792, for study at the French Academy in Rome, where he stayed for five years. After his return from Italy, in the disturbed patronage conditions of the French Revolution, he seems to have abandoned painting and turned to writing, although he began to exhibit in 1795, and continued to do so at various intervals up to 1814. He exhibited three pictures at the Louvre: the Mother's Lesson, the Bath of Paul and Virginia and Daedalus and Icarus.
His Leda won an award of merit in 1801, and is in the château de Fontainebleau (deposited by the Louvre in 1932). His Mother's Lesson was the subject of a popular engraving. Paul and Virginia Bathing (an illustration of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's popular novel, also engraved), his Sleep of Achilles and Daedalus and Icarus (1799, illustrated right) are all at the Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle, Alençon.
It is chiefly for his writing on the arts that he made a reputation, however. He published nearly one hundred volumes during his lifetime. Landon was among the collaborators of the influential Journal des arts, des sciences et de la littérature. He was also a part-owner of the Gazette de France, where the extended accounts of annual Paris Salons were published. He was a paintings conservator at the Louvre, a corresponding member of the Institut and painter to Charles Ferdinand, duc de Berry, whose widow's paintings gallery he catalogued.