François-joseph Heim (1787-1865) The Capture Of Troy?

François-Joseph HEIM
(Belfort, 1787 - Paris, 1865)
The capture of Troy?
Oil on its original canvas
H. 50 cm; W. 72.5 cm.

Related work: A sketch in the Henner Museum, identified by Jacques Foucart, corresponds to the left part of our study. We note many variations: absence of the dead child in the foreground, only one child with his mother on the left and not two, etc. (ill. 1)

Bibliography: From David to Delacroix. French painting from 1774 to 1830. Note by Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée and Jacques Foucart, page 483.

Son of a drawing teacher, François-Joseph Heim became Vincent's student before winning the Prix de Rome in 1807 on the theme of Theseus conquering the Minotaur. In Rome, he studied the great painting of the 17th century and made numerous copies after groups of Michelangelo's Last Judgement. Upon his return to Paris, he began a brilliant career as a history painter, which earned him numerous commissions for churches and castles. He thus produced two ceilings for the Charles X Museum in the Louvre. A favourite painter of the Bourbons during the Restoration, supported by the Count of Forbin, he particularly distinguished himself with a painting of contemporary history exhibited at the Salon of 1827: Charles X distributing the rewards to the artists following the Exhibition of 1824, the success of which contributed to his election to the Institute in 1829. Somewhat disdained during the July Monarchy, although still very active, François-Joseph Heim benefited from a retrospective room at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 and earned the admiration of Charles Baudelaire. Official artist, Heim is nonetheless the author of "brilliant, boiling, animated, nervous canvases, with a surprising vigor of impasto and freedom of brush. (...) Width of gesture, energy of drawing, are served by a nervous and solid modeling, a power of brush, vigorous tones, a firm, frank execution" (Brejon de Lavergnée and Foucart). This passion, this dynamism in the composition and in the touch are found in our sketch, a magnificently spirited piece whose romantic spirit covers reminiscences of Italian painting of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, while the white horse on which a Roman general arrives seems to be a link between Rubens and Delacroix. Despite a certain confusion of the scene and the absence of the horse, several elements seem to correspond to the fall of the Trojan city. From left to right: Aeneas carrying Anchises (Anchises seems very young, however...), Andromache and her son Astyanax (but there are several children in our work), Hecuba and the remains of Priam; as for the rider dressed in red, is it Ulysses contemplating the end of Troy, or Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles who had just assassinated Priam, or Menelaus wondering about the fate he will reserve for Helen?