Robert Lefèvre

Robert Jacques François Faust Lefèvre , born the September 24th 1755 with Bayeux and dead the October 3rd 1830 with Paris, is a painter French.

Painter of history, religious compositions and portraits, Robert Lefèvre made his first drawings on the files of a prosecutor, in whom his father had placed it like expeditionary. Its vocation gaining over the will of his/her parents, it gave up the basoche and would have made with foot the voyage Caen in Paris where he was the pupil of Jean-Baptiste Regnault.

To the Living room of 1791, it exposed the Dame out of black velvet , which was the starting point of its reputation. The portraits of Napoleon, of Joséphine, Mrs Laetitia, Guerin, Carle Vernet (which is with the Louvre), of Pie VII attracted the vogue to him and did of him one of the large portraitists of the imperial personalities. That of Marie-Louise put the seal at its reputation.

At the time of the re-entry of the Bourbons, Robert Lefèvre painted the Portrait of Louis XVIII , for the Chambre of the Pars, and accepted the Cross of the Légion of honor with the title of First Painter of the King, whom it lost with the Révolution of July. Robert Lefèvre painted a great number of portraits and several paintings of history. The principal ones, among the portraits, are: those of Malherbe (Public library of Caen), of Charles X, the duchess of Angouleme, the duchess of Berry, Charles-Pierre-François Augereau duke of Castiglione (Museum of Versailles), and of the baron Alive-Denon Dominique, scientist and engraver of merit, director of the Museum of Versailles.

Two of the mythological tables of Robert Lefèvre, the Love sharpening its arrows and the Love disarmed by Venus , (T. 1,84 over 1,30), were engraved by Desnoyers. In the historical kind, ready Phocion has to drink the conium , Roger delivering Angélique , Héloïse and Abeilard , a Calvaire for the Mont Valérien are most famous of the compositions of Lefèvre.

Reached of a cruel and incurable disease, Lefèvre finished Paris its last table, the Apotheosis of Saint Louis for the Cathedral of the La Rochelle , when, overcome by atrocious sufferings, it was given up with despair and put, says one, end at his days. The large fabric, I' Love disarmed by Venus , of the Museum of Louvre, was reproduced in Naked Old and Modern the . One feels to weigh heavily the influence of David in this conventional painting where the reminiscence of the antique misses neither of elegance nor of skill, but where painting is cold and dry.

References

Gaston Lavalley, the Painter Robert Lefèvre, his life and its work , Caen, L. Jouan, (about 1920).
Memories of the Company of sciences, arts and the Humanities of Bayeux , 1901, p. 121-2

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