Attributed to Marie Françoise Constance Mayer Attributed to Marie Françoise Constance Mayer, after Pierre-Paul Prud'hon

Village suisse, Paris;

Where acquired, Private collection , in 1987;

Acquired from the above by the present owner, in March 2003.

Napoléon, l'Empereur sous la verrière du Grand Palais : La collection Pierre-Jean Chalençon, cat. exh. Grand Palais, Paris 2018, pp. 74-75 (as Constance Meyer and Pierre-Paul Prud'hon).

Logis La Chabotterie, Napoléon Bonaparte et la Vendée, May-October 2004, cat. no. 100 (as Constance Meyer and Pierre-Paul Prud'hon);

Napoleon: An Intimate Portrait. A travelling exhibition from the Russell Etling Company featuring the Collection of Pierre-Jean Chalençon, Catalogue by Pierre-Jean Chalençon, Brett Topping and Russell Hull Etling, Russell Etling Company, 2005-2011, p. 25 (as Constance Meyer and Pierre-Paul Prud'hon).

At the 1801 Salon, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon exhibited a large drawing in black and white pencil described in the catalogue as follows: ‘La Paix, allégorie. Bonaparte au milieu de la Victoire et de la Paix, est suivi des Muses, des Arts et des Sciences ; son char est précédé des Jeux et des Ris’ (‘Peace, an allegory. Bonaparte, between Victory and Peace, is followed by the Muses, the Arts and the Sciences; his chariot is preceded by Play and Laughter’. It is now in the Musée Condé, Chantilly. The composition, glorifying the young conqueror of Marengo, wreathed in laurel leaves and processing on a classical chariot, would become very popular, especially with the Bonapartists, and painted copies were made.

Constance Mayer, a pupil of Prud’hon, worked at his side from 1803 to 1821, the date of her death. She was known for replicating her master’s works and painted large compositions after his sketches, often under his supervision and sometimes with his collaboration. The fine quality of the present work is an argument in favour of an attribution to this young artist.

The catalogue of the 1997­­–98 exhibition, op. cit., indicates that it was the Danish naturalist Bruun Neergaard who inspired the subject and that he commissioned it from Prud’hon to illustrate his book Sur la situation des Beaux-Arts en France, published in 1801. The Chantilly drawing was supposed to have been engraved, but that never happened and another much smaller version in pen was used as the frontispiece for Bruun Neergaard’s book.