Edmond Dyonnet

Edmond Dyonnet (1859–1954) was a Canadian painter, born French and naturalised Canadian. He taught numerous students in Quebec province and was an academician and secretary of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

He was born on 25 June 1859 in Crest (Drôme), France, from the marriage of Ulysses-Alexandre Dyonnet, industrialist, and Goullioud Albine. The real family name is Guyonnet de Pivat but due to an error of births during the French Revolution, the surname became Dyonnet. Edmond died in Montreal on 7 July 1954, at age 95. He was buried with his family in the cemetery of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, in Montreal.

Edmond had two younger sisters, Emma Dyonnet, wife Lorin (1866–1947) and Clémence Dyonnet, wife Chabot (18? -1905). Ulysses, the father of Edmond, had an older brother Leon Dyonnet Goullioud who married Helen, the sister of Albine. Leon Dyonnet made a fortune in corsets for women in association with Amyot from 1886 to 1891 and set up the Dominion Corset company, rue de la Couronne in Quebec City. The couple had a daughter artist, cousin of Edmond Dyonnet: Eugénie Dyonnet, who immigrated to Canada in 1872 and died in 1875 in Montreal.

Edmond Dyonnet was born in Drôme in 1859, and at 9 years old, he followed his father and migrated to Italy, he continued his primary education in Turin, from 1868 to 1873, in municipal schools and then returned to France with his family in the Drôme. He studies at Crest high school from 1873 to 1875. His father Ulysses met in Paris the brother of Judge George Baby who convinced him to emigrate to Quebec.

On May 16, 1875, the family emigrated to Canada. In 1882 Dyonnet moved to Labelle, Quebec in the Laurentian mountains. The village was founded by Father Antoine Labelle. Ulysses Dyonnet was a pioneer; he cleared land and resumed two mills, a sawmill and a flour mill. The timber industry was thriving. Using the North River Rouge (Quebec) for transportation of the wood, it was then sawed at the family business in Labelle, located near the Iroquois Falls. The trade was intense. The family expanded.

The young Edmond stayed in Montreal, where he studied drawing at the National Institute of Fine Arts from 1875 to 1881. One of his teachers was Father Joseph Chabert (1831–1894). In 1882, he returned to Italy and studied painting at the Accademia Albertina in Turin with Andrea Gastaldi and Pier Celestino Gilardi. After Turin, he did a complete tour of Italy and then went to Napoli in 1883 and to Roma at the Villa Medicis in 1884.

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