Portrait of Jacques Maximilien Benjamin Bins, comte de Saint-Victor(Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson)
Portrait of Jacques Maximilien Benjamin Bins, comte de Saint-Victor
Oil on canvas, unlined
92 x 73 cm (36.2 x 28.7 in)
Signed with monogram and dated at lower left
on the spine of the book: ALGDRT/ 1813
PROVENANCE:
Eudoxie Gavarret, daughter of the sitter; and thence by descent.
EXHIBITED:
Paris, Salon of 1814, no. 443.
LITERATURE:
P. A. Coupin, uvres posthumes de Girodet-Trioson, Paris, 1829, vol. I, p. lxj (where dated 1812).
M. de Vasselot, Histoire du Portrait en France, Paris, 1880, p. 220.
S. Lemeux-Fraitot, Ut Poeta pictor, les champs culturels et littéraires dAnne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824), Université de Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2003, vol. I, p. 375.
S. Guégan, Ni rouge ni blanc: Girodet et le nouvel ordre des choses, in Girodet 1767-1824, exhib. cat., Paris, 2005, p. 119, under note 93..
Before a plain grey-brown background, the renowned journalist and homme dlettres, Jacques de Saint-Victor (1772-1858) is depicted seated at a desk draped in red velvet, upon which sit a pen and inkwell beside a leather bound volume of Homer atop a scattering of papers. Leaning slightly to the left, with his right forearm upon the book, his left hand rests lightly upon his wrist. He is dressed in a plain coat of fine black wool over a white linen shirt with a high stock. His sparse brown hair is worn brushed forward over a clean shaven face turned in three-quarter profile. Girodet captures Saint-Victor in a pose, which, while casual, is dignified, even alert, and balances the effect of the hands languidly crossed over the book with the clear gaze of his subjects grey eyes focused steadily to the left and beyond the confines of the canvas.
Stylistically, the present portrait adheres to the traditional Davidian formula for portraits assis, in which a tight, formal composition, often placing the sitter at the front of the picture plane, is balanced with a subtle and sensitive approach to physiognomy. Like Girodet, Saint-Victor was an ardent royalist and his portrait almost mirrors that of the Comte de Sèze (Fig. 1). Raymond de Sèze had been one of the defence council for Louis XVI. Girodet had painted the portrait in 1806, but it was first exhibited eight years later, when, in an effort to declare his support of the Bourbon Restoration, Girodet included it in his selection for the Salon of 1814 where it hung alongside his portraits of Chateaubriand and Saint-Victor.
However, the closest formal comparison with the present work can be made with Girodets 1795 portrait of the wealthy Genoese merchant Giuseppe Fravega (Fig. 2), painted in Genoa during the artists Italian period and noted by Sylvain Bellanger as the most Davidian [portrait] that Girodet ever painted. In both portraits the sitter is placed behind a desk scattered with writing implements seated in a physically relaxed pose which highlights by contrast the alert intensity of the facial expression. In both portraits the subjects introspective gaze is directed beyond the canvas and the facial features are painted delicately and yet vividly. Girodet gives both men, the same vermilion in the lips and cheeks and even five-oclock shadow to lend verismo and vitality to their pale complexions that contrast with the deep chiaroscuro of their plain costumes.
After the turn of the century Girodet developed a remarkable versatility in his portraiture for capturing the unique and intrinsic character of his subjects, as illustrated by the portraits of the artists adoptive brother, Benoît Agnès Trioson, or his iconic images of Chateaubriand and Jean-Baptiste Belley. After 1799, the romantic influence of Gros and Gérard began to overshadow Davidian formalism in his portraiture and by the second decade of the 19th Century Girodet favoured depicting his sitters bust-length and with a direct gaze, as in his portrait of the architect and poet Louis-Charles Balzac (1811). This begs the question why two years later the artist appears to have chosen to revert to the Davidian model for his portrait of Saint-Victor. It is possible that the answer lies partly in the artists specific relationship with his subject.
A close friend and admirer of the artist and his work, it is not certain when Saint-Victor first met Girodet. We know that in 1802, the comte sent Girodet a poem he had written in praise of Ossian recevant les guerriers français dans ses palais aériens. Girodets bizarrely original composition was exhibited in that years Salon and had been publicized by the artist with an elaborate and shrewdly engineered promotional campaign. Saint-Victor shared Girodets fascination with the Ossian poems, and in 1806 even dedicated his libretto for Étienne Méhuls Ossianic opera Uthal to the artist. In fact, it is tempting to read Girodets reference to Homer in Saint-Victors portrait as a nod to their shared taste for MacPhersons romantic fraud; comparisons between blind Ossian and blind Homer were an established conceit among fans of the genre. However, the book could equally refer to his respect for Saint-Victors reputation as a scholar and translator of classical verse. Among other works, Girodet and Saint-Victor shared an enthusiasm for Anacreon and in the course of their discussions into the subject began, around 1807, to form the idea of a professional collaboration to publish an illustrated version of Saint-Victors translation of the Odes. Girodet apparently set to work immediately with a passion and conviction that was in no small part a reflection of his deeply Hellenic leanings. Girodet was so captivated by the project that he eventually abandoned Saint-Victor in favour of making his own translation to accompany his illustrations. When Saint-Victors version was published in 1810 it contained only two of Girodets vignettes, along with another two by Pierre Bouillon, all of which were engraved by Karl Girardet. The authors disappointment in Girodets desertion of their project was clearly expressed in his preface to his own version. Here, Saint-Victor tells his friend in so many words that were it not for the opportunity to partner with Girodet to reinterpret Anacreon via an equal synthesis of prose and image, he probably would not have undertaken this work. Moreover, what Saint-Victor saw as the conventional result of his text-driven interpretation of the Odes was a bitter disappointment to one who had envisioned a sort of immortality from this collaboration. Nevertheless, Saint-Victor retained the hope that Girodet might later chose to return to the project and include his illustrations in a later edition. This hope was never to be realised. Girodets illustrated version was published posthumously in 1825, barely a year after the artists death. That their friendship ultimately survived the Anacreon project is evidenced not only by the present portrait in which Girodet immortalised his friend as a scholar, an homme de letters and a beacon of aristocratic liberalism but also by the fact that three years later, Saint-Victor dedicated the reissue of his Voyage du Poète to the painter.
Born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), Jacques de Saint-Victor became a renowned journalist of a decidedly conservative, but by no means reactionary bent. He was at one time, an editor of the Journal des débats et des décrets, the mouthpiece for the liberal ideal of a constitutional monarchy and its supporters. He also contributed to the royalist daily Drapeau blanc. In 1812, he married Marie-Joséphine-Augustine de Tourmont, who bore him three children: Alice, Eudoxie, who inherited Girodets portrait of her father, and his son, Paul, who became one of the celebrated authors of the Second Empire.
On 26 December of 1813, while attempting to board an English frigate off the coast of Morbihin, Saint-Victor was arrested and taken to Paris where he was imprisoned as a spy for the exiled Louis XVIII. He spent only a matter of weeks in prison due to a lack of evidence for his being a royalist agent (which he was), and the fact that the Napoleonic regime was fast waning towards the emperors abdication only three months later.
Financial crisis and his disillusionment with the ideal of a constitutional monarchy, as embodied by Louis XVIII under the Bourbon Restoration, impelled Saint-Victor to decamp to America in 1830, where he lived for about three years, dispatching regular bulletins home to fellow royalists such as his friend Arsène, le Comte de O’Mahony (1727-1858). Upon his return to France around 1834, Saint-Victor published a volume of these letters and subsequently took over La France as editor-in-chief. He also lived for some time in Fribourg and then Rome, before finally retiring to Paris, where he died in 1858. His notable work as a journalist and scholar aside, Saint-Victor is perhaps best remembered as a poet, specifically the author of the lyric ode to hope in the face of oppression, L’Espérance (1802), one of the most celebrated lines of which was: Consolez-vous, pensez à laimmortalité.
Eudoxie Gavarret, daughter of the sitter; and thence by descent.
P. A. Coupin, uvres posthumes de Girodet-Trioson, Paris, 1829, vol. I, p. lxj (where dated 1812).
M. de Vasselot, Histoire du Portrait en France, Paris, 1880, p. 220.
S. Lemeux-Fraitot, Ut Poeta pictor, les champs culturels et littéraires dAnne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824), Université de Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2003, vol. I, p. 375.
S. Guégan, Ni rouge ni blanc: Girodet et le nouvel ordre des choses, in Girodet 1767-1824, exhib. cat., Paris, 2005, p. 119, under note 93.
Paris, Salon of 1814, no. 443.