Pierre Révoil

Bio

Although Fleury Richard is generally regarded as the leader of the troubadour school, the nickname — “Révoil brothers” — given to Richard and his fellow Lyonnais Révoil, suggests Révoil’s dominance. He entered the studio of J.-L. David in 1795 but was one of the first Davidian students to be disenchanted with neo-classical subjects. In 1804 the Ministry of the Interior commissioned a painting of the Passage of the Emperor through Lyon, shown at the Salon of that year and sent to the Lyon Museum – this was destroyed no the orders of the Restoration Prefect of the Rhône in 1816. Révoil’s loyalist politics made him particularly sympathetic to the lives of past kings, although this proved no barrier to his patronage by the Imperial court, which acquired his first modern historical-anecdotal painting, the Ring of the Emperor Charles V at the Salon of 1810 (for the considerable sum of 13,000 francs, now in the Embassy of France, Madrid). Révoil had an antiquarian interest in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which he had studied at first hand in Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français. This enabled him to fill his pictures with the kind of detail that fascinated his contemporaries; in addition to a fine library, Révoil had a collection of objects in his “cabinet de gothicités” that he sold in 1828 to the Musée Royal.

From 1810 onwards he began to produce such works in earnest, but the high finish and intricate detail made it hard to complete many and between 1810 and 1817 there are only seven paintings known (according to M.-C. Chaudonneret, in her catalogue raisonné of the artist), of which three are lost. His elaborate and deliberately archaicized Tournament of the 16th Century (Lyon, Musée des Beaux Arts), was shown at the 1812 Salon and the Convalescence of Bayard, with a view through an open door – a common feature of so many of his compositions – at that of 1817 (acquired by the royal household and now in Paris, the Louvre). The latter work had actually been commissioned by the State in 1813, but the artist had painted in the same year (and shown at the same Salon) a work that would not have had the same appeal to the Imperial government, Henri IV Playing with His Children, a subject painted several times by J. B. A. Ingres. The latter work was the first of several acquired from the artist by the Duchess of Berry, who had been encouraged in her patronage of this school by the curator of her collection, the painter Coupin de la Couperie (who had invented the first of the Paolo and Francesca compositions, shown at the 1812 Salon). Révoil continued to produce such historical subjects through the 1820s, but after 1830 he concentrated more on teaching, as he held a professorship at the Lyon Academy. He obtained five further commissions from the state, three of them for Versailles where they remain today. His last work was dated 1841, but he continued to teach for another decade.