Régis François Gignoux was born in Lyons, France, in 1814. He received his early education at Fribourg and studied art at the Academy of St. Pierre in Lyons before entering the School of Fine Arts in Paris. There he became a pupil of Paul Delaroche, who recognized his ability as a landscape painter and encouraged him to pursue the genre.

Gignoux came to the United States in the early 1840s and established a studio on Tenth Street in New York City. His work soon attracted attention, and he began taking on student artists, including George Inness. He exhibited extensively in New York City and Brooklyn and regularly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1851, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design.

Gignoux’s work also brought him to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In July 1850, he traveled through the region with Frederic E. Church and Richard W. Hubbard while the three artists were en route to the coastal regions of Maine. Letters published in the Bulletin of the American Art-Union and attributed to Church documented their travel through Littleton, Bethlehem, Fabyan’s, Crawford Notch, Franconia Notch, Plymouth, and Wolfeboro. During this portion of the trip, the artists made numerous pencil sketches in the field rather than oil paintings.

He was also active in developing the art community of Brooklyn. When the Brooklyn Art Association was organized, Gignoux was elected its first president. In 1861, at the Association’s first major reception, his recently completed Indian Summer was the principal attraction. The large painting depicted a landscape in the Alleghany Mountains of Virginia and was subsequently sent to Paris for exhibition.

The artist was known to have exhibited White Mountain subjects both domestically and abroad. In 1863, he exhibited New Hampshire Scenery at the Brooklyn Art Association as #120. He submitted Winter in New Hampshire to the National Academy of Design in 1858 as #441. Gignoux later exhibited Mount Washington, belonging to A. T. Stewart, at the Paris Exposition of 1867.

Gignoux returned to France in 1870 and remained there for the rest of his life. He died in Paris on August 14, 1882, in his sixty-ninth year. His body was returned to the United States for interment, and he was finally laid to rest at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY on October 25th of that year.

His paintings are preserved in the collections of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, and the New-York Historical Society.

Obituary From Boston Evening Transcript
Boston, MA / Thursday, August 17, 1882 / Page 1 / RECENT DEATHS.

Régis François Gignoux, the well-known artist, who died in Paris, France, on Monday, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, was born in Lyons and educated at Fribourg and the Academy of St. Pierre in Lyons, where he received an annual premium. Later he entered the School of Fine Arts in Paris and became a pupil of Delaroche. In 1844 he came to this country, and in 1851 he was elected a member of the Academy of Design. He was the first president of the Brooklyn Art Academy.

In 1870 he returned to France, and remained in that country up to the present time. Among the best known of Gignoux’s landscapes are “Virginia in Indian Summer,” “Niagara in Winter,” “Bernese Alps by Sunrise,” “The Four Seasons in America,” “Niagara by Moonlight,” “The Dismal Swamp,” and “Moonlight on Saguenay.” His “Mount Washington” was at the Paris exhibition of 1867, and his “Spring” at the Philadelphia exhibition of 1876.

References
“Chronicles of Facts and Opinions: American Art and Artists,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union (November 1850)
Independent research by the authors
New Hampshire Scenery