1810
oil
canvas
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
Sketch for The Revolt of Cairo is a 1810 oil by Anne-Louis Girodet, a Romanticism work, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
This sketch shows a dark, crowded scene with soldiers clashing in a mosque. Bodies pile up while fighters swing swords and guns. The artist used loose brushstrokes to keep it rough and immediate. Girodet never saw the 1798 battle himself. As a loyalist to Napoleon, he turned the chaos into drama with dramatic light and shadow. The sketch was one of many studies he made before the big painting. Look up the final piece at the Art Institute of Chicago.
This is a preparatory sketch for a monumental painting depicting one of the bloodiest moments of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt: the suppression of an uprising in Cairo. The conflict included a massacre in the Al-Azhar Mosque of Mamelukes, a military class of enslaved men who occupied much of the Middle East at that time. As there were no surviving eyewitness reports, Girodet was free to interpret the event as he wished, and, as a commission from Napoleon, the painting celebrates the French point of view. Throughout the work, Girodet perpetuates European fantasies of the Middle East as…
The artist’s studio, estate inventory, April 11, 1825, no. 107 [see Bajou and Lemeux-Fraitot 2002]; Girodet Sale, Paris, April 11, 1825, lot 17; sold for 2,850 francs to Jacobs [according to Voignier 2005]. Joseph Basile Ducos; sold Paris, December 18, 1837, lot 18. Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, March 25, 1987, lot 37; sold to Galerie Charles Ratton-Guy Ladrière, Paris; sold to Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York by 1999 [according to Jean Christophe Baudequin’s email of July 27, 2006, copy in curatorial file]; sold to the Art Institute, 1999.
Paris, Musée du Louvre , Girodet 1767-1824, September 22, 2005-January 2, 2006; traveled to Chicago, Art Institute, February 11-April 30, 2006; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 24-August 27, 2006; Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts, October 12, 2006-January 21, 2007, cat. 57, ill.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (French pronunciation: ; or de Roucy), also known as Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson or simply Girodet (29 January 1767 – 9 December 1824), was a French painter and pupil of Jacques-Louis…
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