GENERAL DESCRIPTION
This richly detailed painting thrusts us into the tumultuous history of the French Revolution and its aftermath. The two men shown greeting each other at the center of the painting are Joseph Cange, a prison guard, and Monsieur George, an aristocrat who was imprisoned during the Terror, the most radical phase of the Revolution that took place between 1793 and 1794. During his imprisonment, Monsieur George's family received financial assistance from the charitable Cange. Monsieur George, freed from prison and reunited with his family, learns of the generosity of his former guard, and returns to the prison with his wife and servant to thank Cange.
Purportedly based on a true story, this painting is fascinating evidence of the mood of political and class reconciliation that characterized the period immediately following the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror. Tales of Cange's generosity made him a national hero in 1794 and 1795, and his virtue was celebrated in plays and verse.
Excerpt from
Heather MacDonald, DMA label copy, 2009.
NOTES
General Description November 2009
Checked Piction
Was not able to find viable web resources.
Credit line- Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Algur H. Meadows and the Meadows Foundation, Incorporated
1989.134.FA- LEGRAND:
[refers to Boilly, Woman Showing Her Portrait]- The Boilly painting goes very nicely with a genre scene of the same period in the DMA collection by a not well-known but very talented painter, Pierre Nicolas Legrand: A Good Deed Is Never Forgotten (see fig. 106, p. 150). This painting depicts a rather ragamuffin-looking jailer, who unjustifiably imprisoned an aristocrat and took pity upon him. The jailer gave the prisoner a bag of money because the aristocrat lost everything in the Revolution. The aristocrat returns years later to express his gratitude. The work is another moral exemplar about charity and gratitude, which is very typical of the revived moralizing paintings of the Revolutionary period. (22)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
...loose trousers. In the latter case, the wearer was known as a sans-culotte, deliberately choosing to wear the striped pantalon (trousers), sometimes red, white, and blue, in preference to the knee breeches of the elite; such men often wore the bonnet rouge, the red cap of liberty, derived from the pileus, the cap worn by Roman slaves when freed from bondage.
Such a sans-culotte can be seen in Pierre Nicolas Legrand’s painting A Good Deed Is Never Forgotten (fig. 106) in the person of Joseph Cange, a prison guard who—though the precise details aren’t clear—gave help to an aristocrat known as Monsieur George (presumably a pseudonym for a real person) and his family, who were imprisoned during the Terror. After the July 1794 downfall of the radical Jacobin Maximilien de Robespierre, chief architect of the Terror, the prisons were opened. In Legrand’s painting, we see Monsieur George and his wife coming to thank Cange, an event witnessed by his family on the left. Cange is shown in a striped jacket and trousers10 over a cotton vest, and on his head is a tasseled liberty cap, to which is attached a tricolor cockade, an essential part of his prison “uniform.” His family members wear the rather dingy clothes of the poor: hand-me-down, sometimes recycled, garments, enlivened by cheap printed cottons, such as the kerchief on the head of Cange’s daughter. (She is at the far left of the painting, in a striped gown possibly of linsey-woolsey.) Cange’s wife, a shapeless woman, wears a practical and capacious blue apron over her dress and sabots on her feet; a printed scarf covers her shoulders, and a kerchief hides her plain, unstyled hair.
By the time the Terror was over and A Good Deed Is Never Forgotten was exhibited at the Salon of 1796, it was reasonably safe for women to appear modestly elegant, although styles were simple with sleeves to the wrist, as can be seen in the dress of the painting’s Madame George and of the servant behind her. Yet small distinctions of class are manifest: while the servant’s dress is of an unpatterned dark wool, mixed stuff, or cotton, that of her mistress is obviously silk, with a faintly striped dark-pink taffeta jacket and skirt fringed at the hem. Whereas the servant’s hair, under her white linen cap, is simply arranged, Madame George has a curled coiffure, modestly fashionable and unpowdered—powder was too redolent of the ancien régime—in which a white scarf has been entwined like a bandeau of ancient Greece and Rome. Neoclassical styles continued to be popular, with the added bonus that they would have reminded the educated spectator of the link between the stirring events of antiquity and those of contemporary France.
...It is no surprise, therefore, to see Monsieur George in Legrand’s painting shown in a greatcoat, a fashionably high-collared voluminous garment that does not reveal his knee breeches but does show a glimpse of a white vest embroidered in gold and of his shirt’s fine linen. This costume is a striking contrast to Cange’s appearance: the elegant lines of the greatcoat are set against the prison guard’s creased and worn striped jacket and trousers; the silver-buckled polished shoes versus the battered and dirty shoes tied with cord; and the fashionable, round wide-awake hat of beaver compared to the liberty cap. Only the wearing of the tricolor cockade unites the two men, along with their common humanity. Although in the uneasy and often volatile period following the Terror, when those of different political persuasions were able, to some degree, to demonstrate their allegiance in the way they dressed, men like Cange were past history. The future lay with the mainstream of male fashion in the mid-1790s: the greatcoat of Monsieur George...(pages 149-151)
Aileen Ribeiro, The Mirror of History: The Art of Dress in late Eighteenth-Century France," 141- 155, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
NEPIP OBJECT LIST- TALK TO MARTHA and NICKY RE PROVENANCE
“Monsieur George” family by descent, until December 3, 1988 (1); Colnaghi, New York, 1989 (2); Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, Mrs. John B. O’Hara Fund, 1989.
NOTES:
1 Monsieur George is a pseudonym for one of the men depicted in the scene. Monaco, Christie’s, December 3, 1988, 65.
2 Colnaghi is a gallery.
[2] The Foundation for the Arts is a non-profit corporation created as a title-holding entity to serve the people of Dallas but to operate independently of the City. The Dallas Museum of Art (at its own cost) is responsible for the care, storage, insurance, conservation and maintenance of the collection, and agrees to maintain the highest museum standards in the management and handling of the Foundation’s collection. The title to all works of art purchased or otherwise acquired by the Foundation for the Arts is retained by the Foundation.
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Legrand_Pierre Nicolas: ULAN: 500033668
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- Wikimedia Commons~View another depiction Joseph Cange.
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General Description
This richly detailed painting thrusts us into the tumultuous history of the French Revolution and its aftermath. The two men shown greeting each other at the center of the painting are Joseph Cange, a prison guard, and Monsieur George, an aristocrat who was imprisoned during the Terror, the most radical phase of the Revolution that took place between 1793 and 1794. During his imprisonment, Monsieur George's family received financial assistance from the charitable Cange. Monsieur George, freed from prison and reunited with his family, learns of the generosity of his former guard, and returns to the prison with his wife and servant to thank Cange.
Purportedly based on a true story, this painting is fascinating evidence of the mood of political and class reconciliation that characterized the period immediately following the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror. Tales of Cange's generosity made him a national hero in 1794 and 1795, and his virtue was celebrated in plays and verse.
Excerpt from
Heather MacDonald, DMA label copy, 2009.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
Notes
:
1 Monsieur George is a pseudonym for one of the men depicted in the scene. Monaco, Christie’s, December 3, 1988, 65.
2 Colnaghi is a gallery.
[2] The Foundation for the Arts is a non-profit corporation created as a title-holding entity to serve the people of Dallas but to operate independently of the City. The Dallas Museum of Art (at its own cost) is responsible for the care, storage, insurance, conservation and maintenance of the collection, and agrees to maintain the highest museum standards in the management and handling of the Foundation’s collection. The title to all works of art purchased or otherwise acquired by the Foundation for the Arts is retained by the Foundation.
Artist/designers
Legrand_Pierre Nicolas: ULAN: 500033668
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
1794-1795
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
rules
Apply To
Objects
number
Equals
1989.134.FA
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object_notes_2_a-0636.xml.nores