Art Institute of Chicago
Sketch for The Revolt of Cairo
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (French, 1767-1824)LinkedCulture matchlcp-55eb4536435e
- Date
- c. 1810
- Medium
- Oil and ink on paper, laid down on canvas
- Culture
- France
- Department
- Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Institution
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Object ID
- 152851
From the Art Institute of Chicago record
This is a preparatory sketch for a monumental painting depicting one of the bloodiest moments of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt: the suppression of an uprising in Cairo. The conflict included a massacre in the Al-Azhar Mosque of Mamelukes, a military class of enslaved men who occupied much of the Middle East at that time. As there were no surviving eyewitness reports, Girodet was free to interpret the event as he wished, and, as a commission from Napoleon, the painting celebrates the French point of view. Throughout the work, Girodet perpetuates European fantasies of the Middle East as simultaneously opulent and brutal, lavishing attention on Arab and Ottoman turbans, luxurious fabrics, bare flesh, and gore.
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Provenance & credit
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- Credit line
- Purchased with funds provided by Mrs. James W. Alsdorf; Bequest of Luella Thomas; Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial and Alexander A. McKay endowments
- Provenance
- The artist’s studio, estate inventory, April 11, 1825, no. 107 [see Bajou and Lemeux-Fraitot 2002]; Girodet Sale, Paris, April 11, 1825, lot 17; sold for 2,850 francs to Jacobs [according to Voignier 2005]. Joseph Basile Ducos; sold Paris, December 18, 1837, lot 18. Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, March 25, 1987, lot 37; sold to Galerie Charles Ratton-Guy Ladrière, Paris; sold to Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York by 1999 [according to Jean Christophe Baudequin’s email of July 27, 2006, copy in curatorial file]; sold to the Art Institute, 1999.
Linked open data
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- Object type
- AAT300033618
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