Henry SCHEFFER (1798-1862) Lot n° 58

"The Arrest of Charlotte Corday", 1830 Large oil on canvas signed "Henry Scheffer" and dated 1831 lower left. Dimensions : 56,5 x 71,5 cm Charlotte Corday (1768-1793) murdered the Jacobin deputy Jean-Paul Marat by stabbing him in his bathtub on July 13, 1793. Immediately arrested, she was taken to the Abbaye prison and then transferred to the Conciergerie on July 15. The next day, she appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal and was defended by Claude-François de Chauveau-Lagarde, appointed by the president. After the intervention of her defender, the jury found her guilty of murder "with criminal and premeditated intentions". It sentenced her to death and ordered that she be taken to the guillotine wearing a red shirt reserved for parricides. Painted in the middle of the summer of 1830 during the fall of the Bourbons, thirty-seven years after Marat's death, the original painting of the Arrest of Charlotte Corday, measuring 130 x 163 cm, was purchased by the French state in a bid to promote national cohesion. Exhibited at the Palais du Luxembourg for the benefit of the wounded of the July Revolution, it was seen by thousands of people at the 1831 Salon. Acquired by the Louvre Museum in 1892, it was first lent to the Lambinet Museum in Versailles before joining the collections of the Grenoble Museum. Several copies were made by artists, one of which is now in the Musée du Barreau in Paris. Another copy measuring 122 x 168 cm, unsigned, was sold by Martin-Desbenoit in Versailles in 1986. The copies made later are not signed. The canvas we present was painted in size reduction by Henry Scheffer himself, it is signed and dated 1831, that is to say the following year after the original, probably commissioned by a notable or a collector. It is of equivalent quality to the 1830 version. Charlotte Corday, an emissary of the July Monarchy, is shown impassive despite the unpredictability of the sans-culottes surrounding her and the aggressive presence of the dog in the foreground. This painting, inspired by a play by Ducange and Bourgeois, is considered to be an allegory of the first months of the Orléans regime, brought to power by a popular dynamic. The painter strips his subject of all psychological realism and shows the guilty party, with an absent gaze, crossing the composition from right to left: from the half-light that reveals Marat's immobile body, a luminous dynamic is created that directs the gaze in the direction that the young woman, led by her judges, must take. This young moderate republican, bearer of the ideas of the Enlightenment, is painted here as a saint who knew how to "kill one man to save a hundred thousand". The artist gives here to the political murder an intellectual dimension which corresponds to the fascination that the figure of Charlotte Corday exerted very quickly as an archetype of the heroine of a changing world. Condition report: Good general preservation. Provenance : Private collection Aarau Switzerland and Monte Carlo Biography : French-Dutch romantic painter born in The Hague, he was the brother of Ary Scheffer and the son of Johann-Bernhard Scheffer, portrait and history painter at the Court of Louis Napoleon, King of Holland. Raised in the respect of the Empire, he arrived in Paris in 1811 and saw the defeat of the Grande Armée, which influenced his paintings of that period. He enters the workshop of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin and makes his debut at the Salon of 1824. Henry Scheffer increases his clientele by benefiting indirectly from the status of official painter of Louis-Philippe and the royal family that his brother, Ary Scheffer, obtains in 1830. It even seems that he receives more commissions than his elder brother, in particular from the King, for the Versailles museum. With pupils like Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Charles Tillot, Henry Scheffer will remain in the line of the romantic movement and his works will be exhibited until his last participation in the Salon in 1859.