[1] He entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1852 and was a pupil of Léon Cogniet.[4] Lefebvre is chiefly important as an excellent and sympathetic teacher who numbered many Americans among his 1500 or more pupils.Among his famous students were Fernand Khnopff, Kenyon Cox,[3] Félix Vallotton, Ernst Friedrich von Liphart,[5] Georges Rochegrosse,[6] the Scottish-born landscape painter William Hart, Walter Lofthouse Dean, and Edmund C. Tarbell, who became an American Impressionist painter.[7] Another pupil was the miniaturist Alice Beckington[8] as was Laura Leroux-Revault, the daughter of his friend Louis Hector Leroux.[10] Lefebvre died in Paris on 24 February 1911 and was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery with a bas-relief depiction of his painting La Vérité on his grave.
Grave of Jules Lefebvre, Montmartre Cemetery, Paris.