Léopold Robert (1794-1835) Follower Of: "the Stop Of The Harvesters In The Pontine Marshes"

Léopold Robert (1794-1835) Follower of: "The harvesters' halt in the Pontine marshes" Oil on canvas from the first part of the 19th century, gilded frame with gold leaf. Leopold Robert was the inventor of Italian picturesqueness through which the rustic brings antiquity back to life. This is the old world to which Cartesian France has turned its back since its industrial and political revolutions. The Italian is then no longer the figure of an ancient Roman world in whose ruins an aesthetic ideal has been sought since the Renaissance, but he becomes the subject of an ancient world still very much alive and whose wild beauty is expressed in the strong characters of the models, in the fierce youth in ambush in Abruzzo against the Austrian police or in the fisherman's wife crying over her house ruined by an earthquake near Ischia. The Harvesters' Stop in the Pontine Marshes brings us delivers a sunny vision of a summer evening where the hardness of the day's work gives way to relaxation. The attitudes of the bodies and the play of gazes are imbued with vitality and naivety. It is in this light, by taking his student Charlotte Bonaparte as a model for the first woman on the left, that a hidden love will be born in the heart of the painter which will lead him to kill himself in Venice a year later as a new Werther.La Halte des Moissonneurs won the Gold Medal at the Salon of 1831 and earned the Legion of Honor for Léopold Robert, from the hands of King Louis-Philippe