Tag: jacques-louis david

François-Xavier Fabre

François-Xavier Fabre, “The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian”, 1789, Oil on Canvas, 198 x 148.5 cm, Musée Favre, Montpellier, France

Born at the medieval city of Montpellier in April of 1766, François-Xavier Fabre was a French painter of portraits, landscapes and historical subjects. He specialized in half-length portraits that were popular with the British community of Florence, Italy. 

After studying for several years at Montpellier’s art academy, François-Xavier Fabre joined neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David’s studio in Paris. His studies were funded by financier and art collector Philippe-Laurent de Joubert, the father of Laurent-Nicolas de Joubert, a friend of Fabre as well as an amateur artist. In 1787, Fabre painted a portrait of Laurent-Nicolas seated with arms crossed and dressed in waistcoat and shirt open at the neck, a simple and natural style made fashionable by Marie-Antoinette. This portrait is now housed in the Getty Center, Museum South Pavilion, in Los Angeles. 

An outstanding pupil, Fabre rose to prominence after winning the Prix de Rome in 1787. The upheavals of the French Revolution and his own monarchist sympathies led Fabre to relocate to Florence, Italy in 1793. He soon found patrons among the ranks of the Italian aristocrats who appreciated the elegance, precision, and realism of his portraits. Fabre became a member of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, the world’s oldest public institution of fine art training, where he taught painting. Rising to prominence in Florentine society, he became both a collector and dealer of art.

Although he remained a lifelong advocate of Jacques-Louis David’s Neoclassicism, François-Xavier Fabre eventually abandoned history painting due to changing fashions, lack of interest on the part of his patrons, and the onset of gout. He focused his work towards portraiture, landscapes, and printmaking. Between 1803 and 1804 in Florence, Fabre met Princess Louise Maximiliane Caroline Emanuel of Stolberg-Gedern, the former wife of Charles Edward Stuart, the Jacobite claimant to the English and Scottish thrones, and the later widow of Italian Count Vittorio Alfieri. 

Fabre and Louise of Stolberg-Gedern remained companions in Florence until the Countess’s death in January of 1824 at which time Fabre inherited her fortune. He returned to his hometown of Montpellier where he founded an art school and curated his extensive collection of books, 16th and 17th century Italian paintings and drawings, artwork by French contemporaries, and the collected artworks of Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. In 1828, the Musée Fabre was inaugurated in Montpellier. François-Xavier Fabre died at the age of seventy in Montpellier on the sixteenth of March in 1837. Upon his death, his entire art collection became part of the Musée Fabre. 

François-Xavier Fabre painted “The Martyrdom of St. Francis” in 1789 at the age of twenty-three. This was an academic work for submission at his second Académie réglementaire in Paris. Fabre was well-versed in the nude form at this time; he had painted the male nude during his apprenticeship under Jacques-Louis David. Fabre returned several times to the theme of St. Francis over the course of his career. Several of his St. Sebastian paintings are listed in Parisian sales between the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. 

Top Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Autoportrait âgé”, 1835, Oil on Canvas, 72.5 x 59 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France 

Second Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Abel’s Death”, 1790, Oil on Canvas, 147 x 198.5 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France

Bottom Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Portrait of Michal Bogoria Skotnick”, 1806, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 49.5 cm, National Museum, Kraków, Poland

Joannes Echarius Carolus Alberti

Joannes Echarius Carolus Alberti, “Warrior with Drawn Sword”, 1808, Oil on Canvas, 92.5 x 73 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Born in 1777 in the municipality of Maastricht in the southern Netherlands, Joannes Echarius Carolus Alberti was a Dutch Neo-classical painter. The son of Italian lawyer Arnold Josua Joannes Alberti and his Belgian wife Maria Catharine Vogels, he was baptized on the 20th of June in 1777 in Maastricht’s Saint Martin’s Church.

At the age of five, Joannes Alberti moved with his parents to Amsterdam. He began his initial art training in 1796 at Amsterdam’s City Drawing Academy. For two chalk drawings of male nudes entered in competitions, Alberti won a third class prize in 1803 and a second class prize in 1804..These works are currently in the collection of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. In 1804, Alberti won the gold medal of honor at the Felix Meritis Society’s exhibition for his drawing “Marius Amid the Ruins of Carthage”. He won another gold medal in 1805 at the Felix Meritis Society for his drawing of the Greek Hellenistic king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. 

In the beginning of 1807, Alberti received a four-year student pension from the Kingdom of Holland’s Ministry of the Arts for studies in Paris and Rome. He found residence in Paris on the Rue Bataves and, on the fifth of March, enrolled in the École des Beaux Arts where he studied under history painter Jacques-Louis David until 1809. Alberti painted copies after the work of Flemish artist Antoon (Anthony) van Dyck and Italian artist Guido Reni, who painted primarily religious works. As a favored artist of Louis I, the King of Holland, he sent some of his work to Amsterdam for exhibitions in 1808 and 1810, 

In the middle of October in 1809, Joannes Alberti, along with fellow artists Josephus Augustus Knip and Peter Rudolf Kleijn, traveled to Rome, Italy. He met and took up residence with French painter and draftsman Claude Thiénon, who specialized in landscape scenery. Alberti made copies of old master paintings but also personal works. Among the works he shipped back to Holland in 1810 was his painting “Proculeius Prevents Cleopatra’s Suicide”. After returning to Paris, Alberti made engravings coped after master paintings. He also published an educational course on drawing entitled “Cours Complet Théorique et Pratique de l’Art du Dessin”. 

From baptismal records, we know that, through Alberti’s union with Marie Catherine Joséphine Neumeyer, a son named Pierre Charles Antoine Raphaël Alberti was born in Paris on the 12th of December in 1807. From the Departmental Archives of Haute-Marne, a birth certificate shows that a second son, François Eliza Charles Prosper, was born in the town of Giey-sur-Aujon on the 26th of January in 1813. 

Joannes Echarius Carolus Alberti became a member of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1822. The Archives de Paris places his death in Paris on the 10th of May in 1832; he is buried in Paris’s Montparnasse Cemetery. Three of Alberti’s works are in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: the 1808 “Warrior with Shield and Spear”, the 1808 “Warrior with a Sword” and the 1810 “Proculus Prevents Cleopatra’s Suicide”. His 1809 “Scene from the Polish Revolution” is housed in Berlin’s Staatliche Museum Preussischer KulturBesitz. 

Top Insert Image: Joannes Echarius Carolus Alberti, “Warrior with Lance and Shield”, 1808, Oil on Canvas, 72.5 x 91.5, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Second Insert Image: Joannes Echarius Carolus Alberti, “The Preaching of John the Baptist”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 60 x 82 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Joannes Echarius Carolus Alberti (Attributed), (Warrior with Spears and Shield), Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 112 x 88 cm, Private Collection

Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David, “The Death of Marat”, 1793, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 50 Inches, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium

Jacques-Louis David promised his peers in the National Convention that he would later depict Marat, their murdered friend, invocatively as ‘erivant pour le bonheur du peuple’ or writing for the good of the people. “The Death of Marat” is designed to commemorate a personable hero. Although the name of Chalottte Corday, the assassin, can be seen on the paper held in Marat’s left hand, she herself is not visible. Close inspection of this painting shows Marat at his last breath, when Corday and many others were still nearby.

In this sense, for realistic as it is in its details, the painting, as a whole, from its start, is a methodical construction focusing on the victim, a striking set up regarded today by several critics as an “awful beautiful lie”— certainly not a photograph in the forensic scientific sense and barely the simple image it may seem. For instance, in the painting, the knife is not to be seen where Corday had left it impaled in Marat’s chest, but on the ground, beside the bathtub.

“The Death of Marat” has often been compared to Michelangelo’s “Pieta”, particularly  the elongated arm hanging down in both works. Jacques-Louis David admired the work of Caravaggio, especially his “Entombment of Christ” which mirrors David’s painting in drama and light. David sought to transfer the sacred qualities long associated with the monarchy and the Catholic Church to the new French Republic.

Jacques-Louis David painted Marat, martyr of the Revolution, in a style reminiscent of a Christian martyr, with the face and body bathed in a soft, glowing light. As Christian art had done from its beginning, David also played with multileveled references to classical art. Suggestions that Paris could compete with Rome as capital and mother city of the Arts and the idea of forming a kind of new Roman Empire appealed to French Revolutionaries, who often formed David’s audience.