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Portrait of a French Cavalry Lieutenant, 1817

Artist

Louis Honore Saint-Jean (b.1793)

product

Portrait of a French Cavalry Lieutenant, 1817

Artist

Louis Honore Saint-Jean (b.1793)

Guide Price:

SOLD

Oil on canvas; 12 ½ by 9 ½ in; 32 x 24 cm; signed and dated; held in a gilt wood period frame

Provenance: Private Collection, France

Louis Honore Saint-Jean was born in Dunkerque, northern France in 1793. He grew up with the neo-classical traditions of art that were being practiced at the time and largely concentrated on small portraits and genre scenes. There is evidence to suggest that he taught painting and drawing in Paris by the 1830s but further details of his life are obscure and his corpus of known works is small. What remains suggests that he adopted a manner of portraiture that followed such artists as Louis-Leopold Boilly.

The portrait presented here is an image of a confident young cavalry officer proudly displaying the Légion d’honneur, the order instigated by Napoleon in 1802 for distinct acts of bravery. By 1817, the date of this portrait, the Bourbons were once again rulers of France, and Louis XVIII, rather than abolishing a decoration with such a history and angering at least 38000 recipients, simply removed the Napoleonic symbols from the design and continued to confer it. It is possible that the portrait depicts one such new recipient, hence the reason for the proud image.