A pupil of Renoux and then of Rémon at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, he soon left, after failing to win the Grand Prix de Rome. He spent several years travelling around France. His early landscapes, in sober colours, were influenced by Théodore Rousseau, Paul Huet and Jules Dupré, who were to form the Barbizon school of openair painting. As he went further south, to Provence, the Balearic Isles and Spain, his palette became lighter and richer. Between 1849 and 1850, he visited Egypt, Asia Minor, the Greek archipelago and Venice, sending his paintings to the Salon and the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855, when be received his first official award. He began to engrave his own work, having already made two eaux-fortes, Le Roi Lear (King Lear) and Hamlet, in 1854, from drawings by the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, a friend of both his and the Orientalist Eugene Fromentin. Berchere spent April and May of 1856 in the Sinai with Léon Belly, and from July to October, he visited Lower Egypt in the company of Belly, Jean-Léon Gérome and the sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi.
Four years later, he was chosen by Ferdinand de Lesseps to record the various stages of the cutting of the Suez Canal, which was finally going ahead after the first act of concession had been obtained in 1854 by de Lesseps from the viceroy of Egypt, Mohammed Said. Berchöre's offcial commission to draw this colossal enterprise did not occupy all his time, and he undertook many solitary excursions devoted to contemplating and recording the surrounding countryside. It was, he wrote, "an exciting return to beloved, familiar lands, the enticing allure of something new, the elation of a traveller's existence, the sheer bliss of the unexpected." In 1863, Berchöre published his memoirs in the form of letters addressed to Eugene Fromentin, to whom was dedicated the book, entitled Le désert de Suez, cinq mois dans I'lsthme.
These letters, written simply and with talent, are a pleasure to read. The reader shares the author's enjoyment of absolute silence disturbed only by the passing of a caravan, and his fascination with the desert, "its unexpectedness, its grandiose poetry, its mirages and its shifting reflections... The desert insinuates itself into your affections, and you feel that, however stark and godforsaken it may appear, it is actually alive and throbbing with a life that is peculiar to it." He was understandably delighted to be able to return to Egypt in 1869 as a member of the official party for the opening of the canal, together with Fromentin, Frére, Géröme and Vacher de Tournemine.
Whether painting in Palestine, Syria or Egypt, Berchöre did not make a point of depicting Islamic architecture or costumes. The classical ruins of Palmyra or an unusually large tree were of just as much interest to him. His oils and watercolours are those of a landscape painter in the widest sense, not of a convinced Orientalist who selects his subject matter to flatter the public's taste for exoticism. At times treated in a detailed manner, at others with large, loose brushstrokes, in browns, clear blues and greens, with occasional touches of turquoise, Berchöre's pictures have great charm.
During the 1870s and 1880s, Berchöre began to paint humble, everyday things : a jar of olives, pumpkins, fruit, loaves of bread. He kept these still lifes, in rich colours against dark backgrounds, for himself, not for public exhibition and sale. A founder member of the private museum in his native Etampes, he was on the committee from 1875. This museum now owns many of Berchere's watercolours, notably of the local countryside.
Literature: B. Prost, Artistes Modernes, Bouguereau, Tassaert et Berchére, catalogue de leurs æuvres, Paris, 1885.