Prix de Rome in the context of Le chalet

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (/ˈæŋɡrə/ ANG-grə; French: [ʒɑ̃ oɡyst dɔminik ɛ̃ɡʁ]; 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other modernists.

Born into a modest family in Montauban, he travelled to Paris to study in the studio of David. In 1802 he made his Salon debut, and won the Prix de Rome for his painting The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. By the time he departed in 1806 for his residency in Rome, his style—revealing his close study of Italian and Flemish Renaissance masters—was fully developed, and would change little for the rest of his life. While working in Rome and subsequently Florence from 1806 to 1824, he regularly sent paintings to the Paris Salon, where they were faulted by critics who found his style bizarre and archaic. He received few commissions during this period for the history paintings he aspired to paint, but was able to support himself and his wife as a portrait painter and draughtsman.

Méribel (French pronunciation: [meʁibɛl]) is a ski resort in the Tarentaise Valley in the French Alps. Méribel refers to three neighbouring villages in the Les Allues commune of the Savoie department of France, near the town of Moûtiers (45°24′04″N 6°33′56″E / 45.401°N 6.5655°E / 45.401; 6.5655), called Méribel Centre, Méribel-Mottaret and Méribel Village. The villages are within Vanoise National Park and a part of the Les Trois Vallées interlinked ski system.

Méribel Les Allues is a ski resort that was developed adjacent to the traditional hamlet of Morel, with its centre situated at about 1400 metres above sea level. It was founded by a Scotsman, Major Peter Lindsay, who was looking for a new site for winter sports away from the ski resorts of Austria and Germany, because of the growing strength of the Nazi regime. In 1936, he visited the town of Les Allues for the first time. He then imagined how the town could become a ski resort. Firstly, he decided to create a property company in order to develop finances strong enough to build the resort. In 1938, the first lift was placed above Les Allues. A year later, he began the construction of the first chalets and hotels in the hamlet of Méribel. Three years later, the war would stop the development of the resort, but when it was over, development continued. Now a Colonel, Peter Lindsay used specialised architects, Paul Grillo (Grand Prix de Rome in 1937) and his partner Christian Durupt, so that all buildings would be in harmony with the Savoyard style, using wood and stone for the walls, with slanted slate roofs. In 1950, the Burgin-Saulire gondola was built to link the resort to Courchevel. Lindsay's family continue to hold a financial stake in the resort. Lindsay's ashes and those of his wife are scattered on the Burgin mountain.

Laurent-Honoré Marqueste (French pronunciation: [lɔʁɑ̃ ɔnɔʁe maʁkɛst]; Toulouse 12 June 1848 — Paris, 5 April 1920) was a French sculptor in the neo-Baroque Beaux-Arts tradition. He was a pupil of François Jouffroy and of Alexandre Falguière. Marqueste won the Prix de Rome in 1871.

Louis-Hector Berlioz (11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869) was a French Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem and L'Enfance du Christ, his three operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette and the "dramatic legend" La Damnation de Faust.

The elder son of a provincial physician, Berlioz was expected to follow his father into medicine, and he attended a Parisian medical college before defying his family by taking up music as a profession. His independence of mind and refusal to follow traditional rules and formulas put him at odds with the conservative musical establishment of Paris. He briefly moderated his style sufficiently to win France's premier music prize – the Prix de Rome – in 1830, but he learned little from the academics of the Paris Conservatoire. Opinion was divided for many years between those who thought him an original genius and those who viewed his music as lacking in form and coherence.

The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles is an oil-on-canvas painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, produced in 1801 for the Prix de Rome competition. It is now in the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris.

It shows an episode from Homer's Iliad, in which Achilles refuses to listen to the envoys sent by Agamemnon to convince him back into the Trojan War. The topic assigned for the artists competing for the Prix de Rome in 1801 was the warriors' procession toward battle; Ingres' interpretation of the subject characteristically emphasized a moment of psychological drama instead of physical action. The work was intended as a demonstration of Ingres' mastery of the human figure in classical history painting – Odysseus is shown in a red cloak derived from a sculpture by Pseudo-Phidias.

Gustave Adolphe Désiré Crauck (or Crauk; 16 July 1827 – 17 November 1905) was a French sculptor with a long distinguished career.

He was born and died at Valenciennes, where a special museum for his works was erected in his honor. Educated at the École des Beaux-Arts, Crauck took the Prix de Rome in 1851.

Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (2 February 1840 – 4 July 1910) was a French Breton composer, pianist, and professor of music history/theory at the Conservatoire de Paris as well as a Prix de Rome laureate. He was born at Nantes and died at Vernouillet, near Dreux. Debussy was one of his protégés.

François-Nicolas Delaistre (Paris 9 March 1746 – 23 April 1832 Paris) was a French sculptor.

Delaistre was educated by Félix Lecomte and Louis-Claude Vassé. Delaistre won the Prix de Rome in 1772; he studied a year at the École royale des élèves protégés at the French Academy and later at the Académie de France in Rome between 1773 and 1777. It was there that he probably first met the architect Pierre-Adrien Pâris, with whom he later collaborated. His best-known work, the group Cupid and Psyche, was originally executed in Rome (the later marble version is in the Louvre at Paris).

Georges Bizet (né Alexandre César Léopold Bizet; 25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875) was a French composer of the Romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.

During a brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of which were abandoned. Neither of his two operas that reached the stage in this time—Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth—were immediately successful.

Charles-François Gounod (/ɡuːˈnoʊ/; French: [ʃaʁl fʁɑ̃swa ɡuno]; 17 June 1818 – 18 October 1893), usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been Faust (1859); his Roméo et Juliette (1867) also remains in the international repertoire. He composed a large amount of church music, many songs, and popular short pieces including his "Ave Maria" (an elaboration of a Bach piece) and "Funeral March of a Marionette".

Born in Paris into an artistic and musical family, Gounod was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris and won France's most prestigious musical prize, the Prix de Rome. His studies took him to Italy, Austria and then Prussia, where he met Felix Mendelssohn, whose advocacy of the music of Bach was an early influence on him. He was deeply religious, and after his return to Paris, he briefly considered becoming a priest. He composed prolifically, writing church music, songs, orchestral music and operas.

Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet (French pronunciation: [ʒyl emil fʁedeʁik masnɛ]; 12 May 1842 – 13 August 1912) was a French composer of the Romantic era best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most frequently staged are Manon (1884) and Werther (1892). He also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music.

While still a schoolboy, Massenet was admitted to France's principal music college, the Paris Conservatoire. There he studied under Ambroise Thomas, whom he greatly admired. After winning the country's top musical prize, the Prix de Rome, in 1863, he composed prolifically in many genres, but quickly became best known for his operas. Between 1867 and his death forty-five years later he wrote more than forty stage works in a wide variety of styles, from opéra-comique to grand-scale depictions of classical myths, romantic comedies, lyric dramas, as well as oratorios, cantatas and ballets. Massenet had a good sense of the theatre and of what would succeed with the Parisian public. Despite some miscalculations, he produced a series of successes that made him the leading composer of opera in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold (28 January 1791 – 19 January 1833), better known as Ferdinand Hérold (pronounced [fɛʁdinɑ̃ eʁɔld]), was a French composer. He was celebrated in his lifetime for his operas, of which he composed more than twenty, but he also wrote ballet music, works for piano and choral pieces. He is best known today for the ballet La Fille mal gardée and the overture to the opera Zampa.

Born in Paris to a musical family, Hérold trained at the Paris Conservatoire and won France's premier musical prize, the Prix de Rome in 1812. After a time in Italy he returned to Paris and worked first at the Théâtre Italien and then at the Opéra. He wrote several ballets for the latter, but was best known as a composer of opéra comique. Some of them, particularly in his early days, were hampered by poor librettos, but later he had more successes than failures, and his last two operas, Zampa (1831) and Le Pré aux clercs (The Clerk's Meadow, 1832) were immensely popular, and remained in the repertory in France and elsewhere for decades after his early death from tuberculosis in 1833.