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Robert Lefèvre Paintings Letizia Bonaparte in court dress Elisabeth Stroganoff, comtesse Demidoff Portrait of French writer Charles-Victor Prévost d'Arlincourt Portrait of French engraver Vivant Denon Robert Jacques François Faust Lefèvre (24 September 1755, Bayeux - 3 October 1830, Paris) was a French painter of portraits, history paintings and religious paintings. He was heavily influenced by Jacques-Louis David and his style s reminiscent of the antique.
Robert Lefèvre made his first drawings on the papers of a procureur to whom his father had apprenticed him. With his parents' consent, he abandoned this apprenticeship and walked from Caen to Paris to become a student of Jean-Baptiste Regnault (in whose studio he met and became friends with Charles Paul Landon). At the 1791 Paris Salon he exhibited his Dame en velours noir, the point of departure for his reputation. His portraits of Napoleon, Joséphine, Madame Laetitia, Guérin, Carle Vernet (a portrait which is now at the Louvre) and pope Pius VII made him a fashionable portrait artist and one of the main portraitists of the imperial personalities, a reputation sealed by his portrait of Napoleon's new wife Marie Louise. On the Bourbon Restoration Robert Lefèvre painted a portrait of Louis XVIII for the Chambre des Pairs and received the cross of the Légion d'honneur and the title of First Painter to the King, losing the latter on the July Revolution. He painted a large number of portraits and history paintings. The main example of his portraits are those of Malherbe (Bibliothèque publique de Caen), Charles X, the duchesse d’Angoulême, the duchesse de Berry, Charles-Pierre-François Augereau duc de Castiglione (Musée de Versailles), and of Dominique Vivant-Denon. Two of his mythological paintings - Love sharpening his arrows and Love disarmed by Venus (t. 1,84 sur 1,30 [1]), were engraved by Desnoyers - the latter is reproduced in le Nu Ancien et Moderne. His most notable history paintings are his Phocion getting ready to drink hemlock, Roger delivering Angélique, Héloïse and Abelard and a Crucifixion for the Mont Valérien. His last painting was The Apotheosis of Saint Louis for the Cathedral of La Rochelle.
1. ^ According to the Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du musée du Louvre et du musée d'Orsay, volume V, appendices and index, established by Isabelle Compin & Anne Roquebert, Liste des tableaux déposés par le Louvre by Élisabetth-Foucart-Walter, Paris, 1986, page 291, n° d'inventaire INV 4418, this work was in 1872 placed in the musée de Varzy Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/ ", Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ==--==--== |
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