Pierre Louis Joseph De Coninck was a French painter . Pierre De Coninck worked as an apprentice with a painter decorator of Bailleul , before being noticed by M. Leurs, Mayor of Méteren, who recommended him to M. Plichon, deputy of the North. He studied at the painting school in Ypres , then in Lille. . In 1850, he stayed in Paris and then worked in Jules Coignet ‘s studio. He was subsequently received at the Ecole des Beaux – Arts . In 1859, he received the Prix de Rome where he left for four years. Back in Paris in 1863, Napoleon III commissioned him a Christ blessing the children for the church of Saint Pierre de Montmartre in Paris in 1865.