BLONDEL, Merry-Joseph

(b. 1781 Paris, d. 1853 Paris)

French painter. After an apprenticeship at the Dihl et Guerhard porcelain factory in Paris, where he was taught by Etienne Leguay (1762-1846), Blondel moved to Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s atelier in 1802. He won the Prix de Rome in 1803 with Aeneas and Anchises (Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Baux-Arts) but did not go to Rome until 1809, when he stayed there for three years. Upon his return to Paris, Blondel was elected a member of the Academy of Beaux-Arts and accepted a post at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and he received many commissions.

After gaining a gold medal in the Salon of 1817 for the Death of Louis XII (Toulouse, Musée Augustins), Blondel embarked on a wide-ranging and successful career as official decorative painter. In addition to the decoration of the Salon and of the Galerie de Diane at Fontainebleau (1822-28) and the ceiling of the Palais de la Bourse (Justice Protecting Commerce, sketch, 1825; Dijon, Musée Magnin), he received commissions for several ceilings in the Louvre, of which the earliest and most remarkable is in the vestibule to the Galerie d’Apollon (The Sun or the Fall of Icarus, in situ). The ceiling painting in the Salle Henri II (the Dispute between Minerva and Neptune on the Subject of Athens) was removed in 1938, while those in the Salles du Conseil d’Etat, France Victorious at Bouvines (1828) and France Receives the Constitutional Charter from Louis XVIII (1827), are still in place. These monumental allegorical compositions belong to the tradition of David, which by the 1820s had become academic, and display more learning than originality.

Portrait of Félicité-Louise de Durfort, Maréchale de Beurnonville

F�licit�-Louise de Durfort (1782-1870) was the youngest daughter of Count de Durfort, the pre-Revolutionary French Ambassador of France to the Republic of Venice (where died in exile in 1801). She is depicted standing in a simple high-waisted white dress, the splendid cashmere shawl draped over her right arm falling to the ground where the sun streams across it. Her hair is done in the latest fashion, while she is partially shaded by the splendid orange tree against whose large, painted wooden pot she is leaning. To the left we see some steps leading down to a winding path with a distant view of the Château of Balincourt.

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Portrait of a Man

The sitter in the present painting is thought to be Charles Viollet. While not much is known about Charles, his family is rather well known. His son, Paul, was a historian and founder of the Law Library and his great grand-daughter, Helene Roger-Viollet, founded the Mainson Roger-Viollet, the largest foundation devoted to photography in France.

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Two Children in an Empire Interior

The painting is signed and dated.

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