NAPOLEON I. - GOUNOD (Louis-Urbain). Drawing.... Lot 40

NAPOLEON I]. - GOUNOD (Louis-Urbain)]. Drawing. [1841]. Graphite, pen, and India ink, 30 x 29 cm on tracing paper mounted on flexible cardboard. PROJECT FOR THE TOMB OF THE EMPEROR IN THE CHURCH OF THE INVALIDES. THE COMPETITION OPENED FOR THE ELEVATION OF A TOMB TO NAPOLEON I. After the Return of the Ashes (1840), Napoleon's remains rested for a time in the chapel of St. Jerome in the Invalides. To offer him a tomb, a public competition was launched on April 13, 1841: a commission composed of Fontaine, Ingres and David d'Angers, with Théophile Gautier as secretary, was charged with examining the projects, of which there were 80, among which were those of architects such as Victor Baltard, Félix Duban, Henri Labrouste and Louis Visconti. It was the project of the latter, already the author of the decorations of the ceremony of reception of the Ashes, which was chosen in March 1842. Handwritten note in the center of the drawing: "Sketch made by Mr. Gounod, architect, for the tomb of Napoleon emperor of the French, at the time of the project of this monument in the chapel St-Jérôme [sic] in the royal hotel of the Invalides". The present sketch retains the idea of a device in elevation under the dome of the church (like most of the competing projects), in the form of a large superimposition of concentric planes charged with statues, one of which is of the emperor at the very top. ARCHITECT LOUIS-URBAIN GOUNOD (1807-1850) was the son of the engraver and lithographer François-Louis Gounod, and the older brother of the composer Charles Gounod. He would be briefly the architect of the Manufacture de Sèvres from 1848. He is rather lengthily evoked in the Memoirs of an artist (1896) of his younger brother: "My brother, who was an architect, had made, as a pupil of Huyot, excellent studies at the School of Fine Arts. Not wanting to leave our mother, my brother had given up the competition of Rome, which would have taken him away, for five years, from this mother whom he adored and whose support he was. But he had won what was called the departmental prize, which was awarded to the student who had obtained the most medals during his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts. This prize was announced in a public session of the Institute, and our mother had the joy of seeing her two sons crowned on the same day. I said that my brother had been educated at the high school in Versailles. It was there that he had met Le Fuel, whose father was himself an architect at the château, and who was later to make the name he bore famous. Le Fuel had met my brother again as a fellow student in the workshop of the famous architect Huyot, one of the authors of the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, and since then they had formed a friendship that nothing could break.