Page 65 - Revolution Republique Empire Restauration

PIERRE-NOLASQUE BERGERET
Bordeaux 1782 – 1863 Paris
Aretino in the Studio of Tintoretto
Oil on canvas: 59 x 49 cm (23 1/4 x 19 1/4 in)
EXHIBITED:
Paris, Salon, 1822, no. 78.
New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art; New
York, Stair Sainty Matthiesen Inc; Cincinnati, The
Taft Museum, Romance and Chivalry.History and
Literature Reflected in Early Nineteenth-Century
French Painting, June 1996-February 1997, no.1,
fig.115, pp.154, 155, 157, 207, 209, 222.
LITERATURE:
L. N. el-Abd, Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret (1782-1863),
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York,
Columbia University, 1976, no. 112, p. 393.
Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Grand Palais,
and Plaisance, Palazzo Gotico, Les années romantiques
– La peinture française de 1815 à 1850, exhib. cat.,
1996, listed in the biography for the artist (by M.-
Claude Chaudonneret) as ‘lost’, p. 330.
Pierre-Nolasque was born into a family of
established printers and publishers and ini-
tially trained in his native Bordeaux with
Pierre Lacour (1745-1814). In 1799, he
1.The fact that Napoleon derived the iconic bees on his emblem from a feature on the tomb of Childeric I is evidence that he too saw the appeal of this
aspect of the Troubadour style.
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travelled to Paris, where he studied with François
AndréVincent before finally in 1801 entering the stu-
dio of Jacques-Louis David. It was here that Bergeret
met and befriended Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
and Pierre Révoil, artists who would join him in
developing and promulgating one of the more
colourful genres to come out of the bombast of prop-
aganda that typifies post-revolutionary French art:
the so-called Troubadour style. Partly formed as a
reaction against the neo-antique style and Christian
iconoclasm that marked art under the République,
troubadour artists appealed to their Restoration
patrons by illustrating idealized scenes from French
religious and monarchical history, painted in a highly
refined technique, with an attention to antiquarian
and costume detail, and often underpinned by a
moral twist.1 Of particular appeal were subjects
derived from the more apocryphal or anecdotal
aspects of French history, often spliced with vignettes
featuring Italian renaissance artists. Also popular
were literary subjects drawn from the works of
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Scott, and Byron.
Bergeret produced Troubadour subjects from 1806