A pupil of Léon Cogniet at the École des Beaux-Arts, Louis Duveau was awarded the Second Prix de Rome in 1842. He also received three medals at the Salon, in which he first participated in 1842 and where he presented for the first time in 1845 a subject linked to the Breton past, Saint-Malo Preaching to the People of Aleth. Despite his successes in Paris, he remained very attached to his birthplace, while the revolutionary years became a source of inspiration for subjects that he treated with romantic sensibility and generated an immediate echo in the infatuation that Brittany aroused among mid-century artists.

His predilection for history painting urged him towards subjects similar to genre scenes, created using a breadth of scope that earned him the admiration of Baudelaire. A Mass at Sea, kept at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, and The Return from the Pardon at Sainte-Anne-la-Palud, now at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quimper, are among the artist’s most admired paintings.

Duveau took a trip to Rome in July 1842, as shown by a letter addressed to William Bouguereau dated July 30, a trip during which the self-portrait presented here was presumably painted. The artist, who was twenty-four years old at the time, depicted himself painting under an umbrella fixed to the ground on the top of a cliff overlooking the sea.

 

Upon returning from his Italian trip, on the strength of his research and experimentation on Italian soil, Duveau created one of the most emblematic works of his career, The Abdication of Doge Foscari, 1850, now at the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Louis Duveau, The Abdication of Doge Foscari, 1850

Musée des Augustins, Toulouse