Page 59 - Revolution Republique Empire Restauration

ANNE-LOUIS GIRODET-TRIOSON
Montargis 1767 – 1824 Paris
A Study for Galatea
Oil on canvas 46 x 38.5 cm (18 1/8 x 15 1/8 in)
PROVENANCE:
Collection Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (invento-
ry after death 11 April 1825);
Sold for 665 francs to Pannetier?
Collection Rosine Becquerel-Despreaux, niece
and only heiress of the artist;
(mentioned in the inventory made at the château
de Bourgoin by M. Salouzes, Notary, the home of
her husband, March 4th, 1835, no. 32);
Collection Edmond Filleul (mentioned in his own
inventory, 1850);
By descent to the heirs of the Peyiague family:
Sale, Sotheby’s, Monaco, June 21, 1991, lot 28.
EXHIBITED:
Girodet 1767-1824, Musée de Montargis, 1967,
no. 45, reproduced fig. 45.
Stair Sainty Matthiesen Inc, New York &
Matthiesen Fine Art Ltd., London, Eighty years of
French painting: From Louis XVI to the Second republic
1755-1855, Autumn 1991, pp.43-45, no. 14 ill.
LITERATURE:
Perpignon, Catalogue des tableaux, ésquisses, dessins et
croquis de M. Girodet-Trioson, peintre d’histoire, mem-
1. Among the exhibited pictures which attracted particular public notice were the portraits of the ardent royalists Chateaubriand and de Sèze, who had
both conspired against Napoleon, which had in one case been hung in an obscure position in the 1808 Salon and, in the other, rejected altogether.
59
bre de l’Institut … de divers ouvrages faits dans son
école, Paris, 1825, no. 53.
S. Bellenger, Girodet 1787-1824, Gallimard, Paris
2005, exhibition catalogue Paris Musée du
Louvre; Chicago,The Art Institute; NewYork,The
Metropolitan Museum; Montreal, Museum of
Fine Arts, 2005-2007, p.471, cat.141.
In his last years Girodet was largely unmoved by
the stylistic and technical revolutions of the
Restoration era, paying scant regard to new
artistic conventions.While he produced a hand-
ful of drawings of ‘troubadour’ subjects and wrote
admiringly of the refined manner of the painters spe-
cializing in this genre, he never attempted to work in
this style himself. Considering himself outside the
Parisian artistic world, he long felt that he had been
unfairly victimized by the Napoleonic artistic estab-
lishment. Since he had refused to compromise with
the Napoleonic dictatorship, it is hardly surprising
that he did not endear himself to Vivant Denon
(director of the Napoleonic National Museum).
Following the Restoration, Girodet sent almost all his
major works to the Salon of 1814, hoping, perhaps,
that at last he might attain the recognition he craved.1