Scène antique - XIXe siècle

Entering the space of the Roman domus is a temptation to which artists of European neoclassical currents have not failed to succumb. This temptation continued during the second half of the 19th century and if the artists did not visit Rome, Pompeii and the various vestiges of the Mediterranean world, they were familiar with scientific publications and thus had access to plans, engravings and then, from 1850 onwards. , photographs

One can recognize on this table the majority of the pieces constituting the furniture: the candelabra preserved in the museum of Naples, the bronze pedestal table found at Herculaneum. This taste for evidence appears both as a justification for historical sources and as a game of composition. Many painters have asserted that if they wanted to bring ancient life back to life on the canvas, they could only do so by transporting themselves in spirit to the vanished times and relying on the archaeological fact, the site of Pompeii, true open-air museum will shape an ancient imagination among all European artists.

In France, those who are called the "neo-Greces" or "neo-Pompéins" entered the Salon from 1847, on this occasion, Théophile Gautier rented the painting by J.-L. Gérôme entitled "Jeunes Grecs faire beating roosters ”. Rich in such an abundance of archaeological sources or imbued with their own sensibility, was it not tempting, on these sites evoking the past, to force fiction and become an actor in ancient history, reshaping it in order to do so? coincide with their spirit and their manners of the nineteenth century?
not signed
17 3/4 x 23 1/2 in with the frame