Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley
| Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson |
| Year | 1797 |
| Type | Oil on canvas, portrait painting |
| Dimensions | 159 cm × 113 cm (63 in × 44 in) |
| Location | |
Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley is an oil on canvas portrait painting by the French artist Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, from 1797. It depicts Jean-Baptiste Belley, a former slave from Saint-Domingue who was elected to serve in the National Convention following the French Revolution.[1][2] He stands beside a bust of the French abolitionist Guillaume Thomas François Raynal.[3] The composition resembles the artist's later Portrait of Chateaubriand.[4]
Description and analysis
In this painting, Girodet evokes the tensions of the period. Belley, standing, wears the uniform of a Convention member, with a tropical landscape behind him, and has a stylish relaxed pose, as favoured in many French political portraits of Revolutionary politicians. His elbow rests on a bust of the philosopher Guillaume Thomas François Raynal (1713–1796), author of A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (1770).[5] Raynal, who had just died, had been a supporter of the abolition of slavery.[6]
Scholars have noted that the painting foregrounds Belley's body, particularly the groin area, in ways that reinforce an 18th-century French racial stereotype associating Black men with sexual excess.[7]: 65–66 According to art historian Darcy Grigsby, Belley was "an object of Girodet's desire and fantasy".[8] She notes that in the painting, "the large penis is fantasmically touched by the hand whose spread fingers conjure its width and thereby permit the imagining of Belley's remarkable virility".[9] Grigsby further argues that the sexualization is inseparable from the portrait's political project: Girodet's painting "accrues not only liberty and individual autonomy (...) but also the erotic charge generally withheld in abolitionist prints", which typically depicted Black men as "asexual or infantilized".[10]
Provenance
It was exhibited at the Salon of 1798 at the Louvre in Paris.[11] On display in Toulon for several decades, it was acquired for the Louvre in 1828 for 3,000 Francs when it was believed to be a portrait of Toussaint Louverture. Today it is in the collection of the Palace of Versailles.[12][13]
A drawing by Girodet for the portrait in ink and black chalk is in the Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds from the Joseph and Helen Regenstein Foundation in 1973.[14]
Cultural references
The portrait was used for the dust cover of Christopher Bayly's book The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
References
- ↑ Grigsby p.8-9
- ↑ Palmer p.131
- ↑ Rosenblum & Janson p.61
- ↑ Palmer p.131
- ↑ L'histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770)
- ↑ Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy~Trioson Archived 18 January 2021 at the Wayback Machine, at safran-arts.com, accessed 7 August 2008
- ↑ Musto, Sylvia (1993). "Portraiture, Revolutionary Identity and Subjugation: Anne-Louis Girodet's Citizen Belley". RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review. 20 (1/2): 60–71. ISSN 0315-9906.
- ↑ Grigsby p.55
- ↑ Grigsby p.55
- ↑ Grigsby p.55
- ↑ Grigsby p.57
- ↑ Palace of Versailles
- ↑ https://pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/joconde/000PE008287 Palace of Versailles
- ↑ Southgate, M. Therese, Jean-Baptiste Belley in Journal of the American Medical Association Vol. 296, No. 2, 12 July 2006, extract online at jama.ama-assn.org, accessed 7 August 2008
Bibliography
- Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-revolutionary France. Yale University Press, 2002.
- Palmer, Allison Lee. Historical Dictionary of Romantic Art and Architecture. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
- Rosenblum, Robert & Janson, Horst Woldemar. 19th-Century Art. Prentice Hall, 2005.