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that year Gauffier arrived at the Palazzo Mancini, the after the Battle of Actium (Edinburgh, National Gallery of
seat of the French Academy in Rome. He soon gained Scotland) as a pendent to a reduced version of the
the confidence of the director, Louis-Jean-François Belisarius by David belonging to d’Angiviller.
Lagrenée, who preferred his quietly studious character
to that of David’s mercurial protégée, and named In 1788 Gauffier visited Naples. While there he
Gauffier the ‘nouveau Lesueur’.5 Having arrived in secured from the administration a six month exten-
Rome at the same time as David, Gauffier inevitably sion to his residency in Rome. On his return to Paris
met him at the Academy and, consequently was imme- in 1789 he was accepted into the Academy as a histo-
diately absorbed into the master’s circle.Together with ry painter, but the outbreak of the Revolution wiped
David and Droperpuais, Gauffier explored the sur- out any viable market for paintings commissions and
rounding Campagna and made a series of studies which he soon returned to Italy where he still retained con-
were to play a decisive role in his development as a nections. Shortly after his return to Rome in
landscape painter.6 Outside of the Academy, where his December 1790 he married the miniaturist Pauline
fellow students included the architects Percier and Chatillon, who had been his student. They had two
Fontaine as well as the sculptor Chaudet, Gauffier was children who can be seen playing at their mother’s
also friends with Hackert.7 The new director, feet in the self-portrait Gauffier painted in the gardens
Ménageot, noted that ‘[Gauffier] has much promise of the Villa Borghese (Florence, Uffizi). It was proba-
[but] had little experience in painting large composi- bly through the Sablet brothers, Jacques and François
tions [and that finally] he is very thin and his poor and their circle that Gauffier met Thomas Hope
health should be taken into consideration, because (1769-1831), a wealthy English banker and art collec-
when he worked for three or four days he is obliged to tor, for whom Gauffier painted several pictures
rest and is often sick’.8 His frailty aside, Gauffier made including an extraordinary Rest on the Flight into Egypt
rapid progress and his command of landscape and (Poitiers, Musée des Beaux-Arts) and the Achilles
composition were noted by Goethe. Equally, in 1787, recognised by Odysseus, which is reproduced in the plate
Drouais, somewhat condescendingly remarked to illustrating the celebrated Egyptian Room Hope cre-
David of Gauffier’s Jacob and Rachel (Paris, Musée du ated for his London home on Duchess Street off
Louvre): “the landscape is from the brush of an angel. Portland Square.10
It is a charming picture, I must say.”9 That same year
Gauffier painted The meeting of Augustus and Cleopatra After the assassination of Hugues de Basseville

5. Procès-verbaux de l’Académie de Peinture, vol. IX, p. 309; p. 333, no. 8763.
6. See A. Ottani Cavina, Les paysages de la Raison, Paris, 2001, chapters II and IV.
7. Letter from Hackert to Goethe dated 4 May 1806, wherein the artist recalls Gauffier, cited in the entry for the artist in Thieme – Becker, Allgemeines
Lexicon der Bildenden Künstler, Leipzig, 1907, vol. XIII, p.266.
8. Ibidem.
9. Drouais to David, 13 June 1787, cited by J. David in Le peintre Louis David, Paris, 1880, p. 42.
10. See M. Pantazzi in Egyptomania, l’Egypte dans l’art occidental 1730-1930, Paris, Ottawa,Vienna, 1994-1995, p. 188 and p. 194. Between 1790 and 1798,
Gauffier painted for Thomas Hope, who appears to have been one of his principal patrons, buying no less than five canvases.Three of these works are now
conserved in the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Poitiers: The Generosity of the Roman Woman (1790); The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1792), and Odysseus and
Nausicaa (1798). The remaining two paintings Achilles recognised by Ulysses (1791) and Hector and Paris are lost. Hope also had four chairs made copying a
model used by Gauffier in his composition of The Meeting of Cleopatra and Augustsus after the Battle of Actium (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland).

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