"the Standard Bearer" Signed Ferdinand Roybet

Oil on canvas by Ferdinand Roybet. (1840 - 1920) Ferdinand Roybet born April 12, 1840 in Uzès and died April 11, 1920 in Paris is a French painter and engraver. Signed lower right "F. Roybet" In a gilt wood frame and period paste In an interior, a man, feathered hat and old clothes, one hand on his hip, proudly holds a flag with the other leaning on his shoulder. The costume, a yellow satin doublet, the bows of ribbons on the stockings, the strawberry, and the proud little mustache evoke the beginning of the 17th century. And the flag, with alternating white and red edges, in imperial colors (by hypothesis), the sideboard and the painting above (a reminiscence of the “Meninas”?) Place us in the atmosphere of Spanish Flanders at the time of the “Heroic Fair”. And it is there that the painter wants to attract us, in this great Flemish century, and to seduce us by this reminder of Dutch painting, taken up and magnified. The evocation of Rembrandt and of the characters of the “Night Watch”, of these bourgeois Guilds so proud to play soldiers, is very present, subjectively, in our painting. It is behind this ease of reading - a 17th century Dutch painting painted by a 19th century Frenchman, a pastiche - a more complicated work ... The reference to the 17th Dutch is evocative of many things: it is a world in transformation, where the rebels against Spain aspire to freedom, religious and commercial, a source of prosperity and therefore recognition-reward of divine commandments. The France of the Third Republic, at this "Belle Epoque" can be found in this idea. Since the Revolution, it has conquered a certain freedom of worship, which has also enabled a commercial bourgeoisie to work and grow rich in relative social calm. But it is also a wounded country, bruised by the defeat of 1870 and which aspires to find its lost provinces for the benefit of the German Empire. Between the cleanliness and the richness of the Flemish interiors, where French society wants to find itself, and the relationship to war, the ambivalence is there. Our soldier, so proud, so arrogant, in this interior so peaceful, and himself so adorned, so little warrior and so "matamor" ... the contradiction is there: it is a ridiculous parade which is presented. We don't want the fight, but simply its image, its glory, not the fight, but peace and comfort. At the limit of the caricature, our painting places us in front of a new light of pre-war Europe. Indeed, Roybet and his musketeers or his pikemen is far from the spirit of Meissonnier or Detaille. The latter evoke the Napoleonic gesture, or the military splendours of the French past, and are considered in their time as the greatest artists (a painting by Meissonnier was worth a building in Paris!), Roybet is more allusive, historicizing, and preferring " costumes ”to History. He likes to paint scenes and anecdotes, mixing lightness and excess, far from the killings and massacres of Rochegrosse. An American billionaire (Vanderbilt) bought him his "Propos galants" 100,000 francs (gold) at the 1893 Salon. His work, still little known today, includes many portraits of personalities, and can be admired in the museum that bears its name in Courbevoie.