Brion, Gustave (b Rothau, Vosges, 24 Oct 1824; d Paris, 5 Nov 1877).

French painter and illustrator. His family settled in Strasbourg in 1831 and placed him in the studio of the portrait and history painter Gabriel-Christophe Guérin (1790–1846) in 1840. He then earned his living mainly by teaching drawing and copying paintings. In 1847 he successfully submitted his first work to the Salon: Farmhouse Interior at Dambach (untraced). In the summer of 1850 he moved to Paris, where he took a studio in a house shared by Realist artists. Brion exhibited regularly at the Salon: in 1852 The Towpath (untraced) was bought by the de Goncourt brothers; and in 1853 he showed the Potato Harvest during the Flooding of the Rhine in 1852 (Nantes, Mus. B.-A.), in which the influence of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet can be seen in the Alsatian peasant figures.