Louis Gauffier: a short life but an eternal work

About the exhibition "Louis Gauffier's Journey to Italy", on view until 4 September at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier (34) and then at the Musée Sainte-Croix in Poitiers (86) from 14 October 2022 to 12 February 2023.

We have already spoken to you here about the landscape artists of the German School in Italy, which can currently be seen at the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence, and about Goethe (1749-1832), who exclaimed on arriving in Rome on 1 November 1786: "At last I was born! Well, just two years before the German writer, it was a young Frenchman by the name of Louis Gauffier (1762-1801) who arrived in Italy. "The career of this history painter, portraitist and landscape painter is exemplary", announces the journalist Jérôme Coignard in his article for Connaissance des arts of July/August entitled "Souvenirs d'Italie". And we readily believe him!

Since Louis XIV (1638-1715) had the excellent idea of accompanying his reign with an extraordinary artistic influence, French painters and sculptors, joined by architects from 1720 onwards, have been able to benefit, after selection, from training at the Académie de France in Rome. This educational structure was all the more essential in the past as it was the only one to provide daily public instruction in the arts until the middle of the 18th century. Founded in 1666 by Colbert on the wise advice of Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), King Louis XIV's first painter, who directed it, but also of Bernini (1598-1680), an eminent sculptor, architect and painter in Rome, the Académie de France in Rome occupies a special place among all the artistic establishments created for the glory of the Sun King. At the outset, its vocation was twofold: as a delocalized school of fine arts, it was to allow young French artists to train in Antiquity and the Renaissance on the basis of the great models of art, while benefiting from a pension and a residence in the heart of the Eternal City. But in exchange for this free training, the boarders were obliged to make copies of Roman works, such as ancient marbles or tapestry cartoons, which were used to decorate the royal residences! So many fewer works of art for the young artists to sell...

Initially established in the humble house of Sant'Onofrio, the Academy moved to Palazzo Cafarelli in 1673, then to Palazzo Capranica in 1684, before taking up residence in Palazzo Mancini in 1725. It was during this period that the Academy welcomed painters such as François Boucher (1703-1770), Pierre-Hubert Subleyras (1699-1749), Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) and Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), and sculptors such as Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828). The Palais Mancini was looted and ransacked after the Revolution. It was not until 1803 that the Académie de France in Rome was reborn from its ashes in the Villa Medici, welcoming not only painting, sculpture and architecture, but also musical composition and engraving. But this was not the case when the young Louis Gauffier, from a modest family in Poitiers, won the prestigious Grand Prix of the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in 1784.

At the time, this trophy was not yet called the "Prix de Rome", allowing him to go to Italy to train for three years, based on a competition and thus offering a formidable art gallery to visit each year. This prize and competition were finally abolished by André Malraux in 1968 in the name of greater equality of opportunity: Today, a selection based on a portfolio by the State and the Ministry of Culture offers an Italian stay of six to eighteen months at the French Academy in Rome, whether at the Villa Medici or extra muros, to French artists working in the disciplines already mentioned, but also in the fields of art history, archaeology, literature, scenography, photography, cinema, video and even cooking.

In 1784, Louis Gauffier left the Parisian studio of the famous David. There he met a serious rival in the person of Jean-Germain Drouais (1763-1788), the student known to be the favourite of the leader of the neo-classical movement. The subject of the competition that year was "The Canaanite Woman at the Feet of Jesus Christ". It was impossible to distinguish between the two young prodigy painters in view of their respective paintings. Thus they were declared ex aequo, both awarded the Grand Prix of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which opened the doors of the French Academy in Rome to them. And so they both left to continue their training in Italy at the expense of the king.

Jean-Germain Drouais, whom David accompanied to Rome because he was so attached to his pupil, died there four years later at the age of twenty-five, as a result of a devastating smallpox. Louis Gauffier died at the age of 39 in 1801 in Livorno, surviving only three months after the death of his young wife of 29 years, who had nevertheless had time to give birth to two children. The young painter, on the other hand, had had time to throw himself passionately into the study of monuments and statues discovered in the Vatican or in princely collections, and to become the official portraitist of European travellers in Italy. "His romantic landscapes, his graceful antique scenes, full of archaeological details, and his sparkling portraits seduced a cosmopolitan clientele," emphasises the journalist from Connaissance des Arts. This was the time of the famous "Grand Tour", the long journey of initiation undertaken by the aristocratic elites of Europe, which necessarily included Italy. Gauffier therefore had no shortage of customers for his paintings for sale.

The painter displayed his art in both mythological and biblical subjects, portraits and landscapes. At the dawn of the 19th century, inclined to the melancholic and already romantic evocation of a nature full of mystery, Louis Gauffier proposed new and very original, intimate and poetic formulas, which finally distinguished him from his contemporaries. The writer and wealthy collector Thomas Hope (1769-1831) bought five paintings from Gauffier and exhibited them in his London home. With their singular charm, Louis Gauffier's seductive paintings can now be found in many museums around the world, such as the Uffizi Museum in Florence, where the royalist painter took refuge during the Revolution, the Sainte-Croix Museum in Poitiers, his birthplace, but also Kenwood House in London, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Art Institute, the Fine Art Museums in San Francisco, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and of course the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, where the exhibition "Louis Gauffier's Journey to Italy" is being held until 4 September, and will then be shown at the Sainte-Croix Museum in Poitiers from 14 October 2022 to 12 February 2023.

It was in Italy, first in Rome and then in Florence, that Louis Gauffier became a friend of François-Xavier Fabre (1766-1837), another student of David. A painter and collector born and died in Montpellier, Fabre was responsible for the creation of the museum that bears his name in 1828. The care with which he collected some thirty works by his friend after his early death explains the very fine representation of Gauffier in the Fabre Museum in Montpellier today. The museum has also been able to count on loans from the French and international institutions mentioned above to present an attractive exhibition this summer, bringing together more than one hundred paintings and drawings by Louis Gauffier and his contemporaries. This is an exceptional opportunity to see, for example, the four 1797 paintings representing views of the Vallombrosa Abbey, near Florence, compared with their preparatory studies.