1863 deaths

Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret (30 January 1782, Bordeaux – 21 February 1863, Paris) was a French painter, pioneer lithographer and designer of medals and costumes for the stage, who studied with Jacques-Louis David.
He was born in Bordeaux, where he received his early training, then moved to Paris, where he worked in the ateliers of François-André Vincent and then Jacques-Louis David, where he met François Marius Granet and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.The high point of his early career was marked by one painting in particular, shown at the Salon of 1806 and considered by Bergeret among his greatest works. Reminiscent of both Poussin and David, the "Homage Rendered to Raphael on His Deathbed"(engraved in 1812 by J.L. Charles Pauquet) was praised by critics for its mood of restrained emotion as well as denigrated by some for the heaviness of its figures. The Emperor Napoleon I purchased "Homage" for his wife, the Empress Josephine, and subsequently it was hung in the gallery of her residence at Malmaison. At some point the painting was removed, stored away, sold, and eventually was purchased for the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio. A second version of the painting, likely autograph and previously believed to be the original Salon version, exists and is now found at Malmaison.
Bergeret played a major role in introducing lithography, in part through his reproductive prints after paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Raphael: his lithograph Mercury (1804), reproducing a detail from Raphael’s fresco in the Villa Farnesina, and his caricatures of current Paris fashion, e.g. Les Musards de la Rue du Coq, Le Suprême Bon Ton Actuel (by 1805) are among the earliest examples of lithographic technique.Bergeret was commissioned to design Napoleonic medals, or provide frieze-like panels en camaïeu to be painted on Sèvres porcelains and to provide designs for the bas-reliefs on the Column in the Place Vendôme, built 1806–11 and directly inspired by Trajan's Column in Rome. The Column suffered the vicissitudes of French politics, having been destroyed and restored twice.
Bergeret too, having led a successful career during the first Empire, was increasingly caught up in artistic rivalries and disputes with government officials of the Bourbon Restoration, which eventually led to his decline. His long standing contract to provide costume designs for the Opera Comique in Paris ended in a protracted lawsuit, which he eventually lost. He had the bad luck to cross the Comte de Forbin, Vivant-Denon's successor as director of the Louvre, who did little to further Bergeret's career, even actively working against him. Bergeret's efforts to win public commissions (such as the ceiling of the Bordeaux Opera House) often fell through due to ill fate as well as political machinations and person intrigues against him. Increasingly in debt and without commissions or patrons, in 1848, Bergeret published his "Lettres d'un artiste sur l'etat des arts en France" an attempt to vindicate himself in which he set out his views regarding the artistic bureaucracy in France, exposing the various problems that it presented to talented artists (such as himself). Bergeret, once in the forefront of artistic trends and technology found himself sidelined from royal and imperial patronage and national influence. He painted little of importance during his final years and died embittered and empoverished.
The subjects of his paintings tend towards the vividly anecdotal. He was early among artists drawing subject matter from the culture of the Renaissance, in the style Troubadour: Honors Rendered to Raphael on His Deathbed 1806 (Allen Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio). Charles V Picking up Titian's Brush 1808; Anne Boleyn Condemned to Death ca. 1814 (Musée du Louvre); Aretino in the Studio of Titian ca 1822; Fra Lippo Lippi Enslaved in Tangiers, Painting a Portrait of His Captor ca 1819; Another major history painting by Bergeret is Marius Meditating on the Ruins of Carthage.
Other typical subjects are propagandistic allegories and representations of current events of the French Empire.

Théophile Archambault (19 February 1806 – 12 December 1863) was a French psychiatrist who was a native of Tours.
He studied in Angers and Paris, where he later worked under psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) in an informal capacity. In 1840 he became assistant to François Leuret (1797–1851) at the Bicêtre hospital, and soon afterwards was tasked with re-organization of the Maréville asylum in Nancy. He spent seven years at Nancy, where he also gave classes on mental pathology at the school of medicine. In 1848 he succeeded Achille-Louis Foville (1799–1878) at the Charenton mental hospital.

Auguste Bravais (French pronunciation: [oɡyst bʁavɛ]; 23 August 1811, Annonay, Ardèche – 30 March 1863, Le Chesnay, France) was a French physicist known for his work in crystallography, the conception of Bravais lattices, and the formulation of Bravais law. Bravais also studied magnetism, the northern lights, meteorology, geobotany, phyllotaxis, astronomy, statistics and hydrography.
He studied at the Collège Stanislas in Paris before joining the École Polytechnique in 1829, where he was a classmate of groundbreaking mathematician Évariste Galois, whom Bravais actually beat in a scholastic mathematics competition. Towards the end of his studies he became a naval officer, and sailed on the Finistere in 1832 as well as the Loiret afterwards. He took part in hydrographic work along the Algerian Coast. He participated in the Recherche expedition and helped the Lilloise in Spitzbergen and Lapland.
Bravais taught a course in applied mathematics for astronomy in the Faculty of Sciences in Lyon, starting in 1840. He succeeded Victor Le Chevalier in the Chair of Physics at the Ecole Polytechnique from 1845 until 1856 when he was replaced by Henri Hureau de Sénarmont. In 1844 he published a paper on the statistical concept of correlation, and arrived at a definition of the correlation coefficient before Karl Pearson. He is, however, best remembered for his work on Bravais lattices, particularly his 1848 discovery that there are 14 unique lattices in three-dimensional crystalline systems, correcting the previous scheme, with 15 lattices, conceived by Frankenheim three years before.
Bravais published a memoir about crystallography in 1847. A co-founder of the Société météorologique de France, he joined the French Academy of Sciences in 1854. Bravais also worked on the theory of observational errors, a field in which he is especially known for his 1846 paper "Mathematical analysis on the probability of errors of a point".
The mountain Bravaisberget, in Svalbard, is named after Bravais.

Théophile François Marcel Bra (23 June 1797, Douai - 1863) was a French Romantic sculptor and exact contemporary of Eugène Delacroix. He was deeply involved in the Romantic era through his uncompromising personality and complex spirituality. His fantastical inspiration evokes the universes inhabited by Goya, William Blake or Victor Hugo - he was at one and the same time a Bonapartist and an anglophile, a passionate Christian disciple of Swedenborg and an admirer of Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism.

Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet and early French Romanticist. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.