Painter. He received recognition as a Swiss-born artist, who painted in France in the 19th century. Born Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre, he was brought by his uncle, as a boy of about the age of ten, from Switzerland to Lyon, France after his parents' death. With his uncle expecting him to exercise his artistic talents in the textile business, Gleyre rebelled against his uncle's plan for his future. He began studying art in Lyon before becoming a student at the Paris School of Fine Arts in 1825 and joining the culture of the many young artists in Paris. Traveling to Italy in 1828, he continued his education for the next four years studying the work of Michelangelo, whose eloquent power enthralled him. I n 1831 he produced his first painting " The Roman Brigands ," which was considered too violent to be displayed. At this point, he became painfully aware of the gap between his goal of being a famous artist and the freedom to express his own creations. Traveling through the Sudan, he left Rome to return to France. This adventure proved to be a turning point in his career as he captured on canvas a part of the world no other artist had painted. In 1834 John Lowell, Jr., an American planning a Near East tour, employed him at $500 a year to paint. After eighteen months of traveling in remote and dangerous places, he left the tour in November of 1835 on his own after becoming very ill first with fever and diarrhea, then sunstroke, and last an infection in his eye. After a two-year return trip to France, he was welcomed home by his family in 1838 and learned that Lowell had died March of 1836 in India. Using his watercolors, sketches and a few oil on paper from the trip, he produced a grand display after obtaining permission from Lowell's heirs. Not only scenes, he had painted portraits of exotic faces and ethnic dress of the Near East, which had never been seen in Western Europe. He was very successful with these paintings receiving a gold medal with a show at the Salon and later, with murals larger then Michelangelo's. In 1843 he obtained Paul Delaroches' studio, and it was there he taught for 25 years over 500 young artists including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Whistler and Louis-Frederic Schutzenberger. Paying only for rent of the studio and the use of a m odel, many of his pupils later would abandon his neoclassic principles of art following their own ideas becoming Impressionists. A decline in his health and the Franco-German War of 1870 forced him to stop teaching. He became withdrawn from the public, but continued to be a staunch Republican and political-minded for the next four years. He never married and remained a lifelong Swiss citizen. His paintings are exhibited around the world including in the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland , the Louvre in Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Today, his 1831 " The Roman Brigands " i s on display at the Louvre Museum . The Musée d'Orsay in Paris organized an one-man show for his work in 2016. Strangely, his remains have been moved four times: First, he was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, then at his birthplace in Chevilly, third, in Calvaire Cemetery in Lausanne in 1896, and last, his ashes are at Chevilly again in 1947.