Porträt von Alexandre Lenoir

When the Revolution began pulling down the royal tombs at Saint-Denis and smashing statues of kings, one man followed the wagons and talked his way into keeping the pieces. That was Alexandre Lenoir, who gathered the salvaged sculpture into a museum of French monuments in a former Paris convent. He and David had met years earlier in the ranks of the National Guard, and the friendship held even when politics pulled them apart. David worked on this portrait over several years and finished it around 1817, after the fall of Napoleon, when his own vote as a deputy for the king's death had sent him into exile in Brussels. He paints Lenoir caught mid-thought at his work rather than posed for the occasion.