PERRIN, Jean-Charles-Nicaise - b. 1754 Paris, d. 1831 Paris

French painter. He entered the Académie Royale in 1772 as a pupil of Gabriel-François Doyen and Louis-Jacques Durameau. He won a medal in the drawing class in 1772 but did not reach the final of the Prix de Rome until 1776, when he won a second prize for Haman Confounded by Esther before Ahasuerus (untraced). He continued his attempts to win the Prix de Rome until 1780 without success, but in that year he was granted the bursary because the winner Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours was Swiss and therefore ineligible to go.

In Rome from 1780 until 1784, Perrin followed the usual student practice of copying from the Old Masters (he was particularly attracted to the works of Caravaggio and Guercino) and painted original works to be sent to Paris for the judgement of the Académie. In 1784 one of these envois was particularly well received, and Perrin was encouraged ‘not to abandon his noble simplicity’.

Cyrus and Astyages

Cyrus was, according to the writings of Herodotus, the founder of the Persian Empire in the 6th Century BCE. Astyages, the king of Media, and grandfather of Cyrus, ordered that his infant grandchild be slain in an attempt to thwart a prophecy that his grandson would one day overthrow him. A kinsman, Harpagus, was entrusted with the murder, but unable to kill the child, instead left the baby with a local shepherd to be exposed on a mountainside. The shepherd’s wife substituted her own stillborn child for the infant Cyrus and raised Cyrus as her own.

Recognized and returned to his true parents after being brought before the king, his grandfather, as a poor shepherd for insulting a nobleman’s son, Astyages at the same time punished Harpagus for disobeying his order to kill the child. Harpagus as a result plotted with Cyrus to overthrow Astyages, eventually succeeding in the conquest of Media and the formation of the Persian Empire.