François Joseph HEIM (1787-1865) - Lot 89

François Joseph HEIM (1787-1865) Roman emperor or general in front of the victims of a burning city Original canvas, curved view. 60 x 73 cm. (Curved frame at the top). The weeping woman on the left of our composition can be found in a sketch by Heim in the Musée Henner in Paris, with several variations. The son of a drawing teacher and a pupil of Vincent, François-Joseph Heim won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1807. Returning to Paris after the Villa Médicis, he began a brilliant career as a history painter, receiving commissions for churches and castles, and creating two ceilings for the Musée Charles X in the Louvre. A favorite painter of the Bourbons under the Restoration, he was admitted to the Institut in 1829. A retrospective room was devoted to him at the 1855 Universal Exhibition, earning him the admiration of Charles Baudelaire. The son of a drawing teacher and a pupil of Vincent, François-Joseph Heim won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1807. Returning to Paris after the Villa Médicis, he began a brilliant career as a history painter, receiving commissions for churches and castles, and creating two ceilings for the Musée Charles X in the Louvre. A favorite painter of the Bourbons under the Restoration, he was admitted to the Institut in 1829. A retrospective room was dedicated to him at the 1855 Universal Exhibition, earning him the admiration of Baudelaire. An official artist, Heim was nonetheless the author of "brilliant, ebullient, lively, nervous canvases, with surprisingly vigorous impasto and freedom of brushwork" (Foucart and Brejon de Lavergnée). This ardor, this dynamism, can be found in our sketch, where the breath of Romanticism comes through. The white horse on which a Roman general arrives seems to be a link between Rubens and Delacroix.