Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury
1797–1890 · France · Academic art, Neoclassicism, History painting
The story
In 1847 Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury exhibited a painting of an old man in a plain robe standing before a bench of cardinals in red. The old man is Galileo, shown in Rome in 1633, the year the Holy Office, the Church's tribunal, made him renounce his claim that the Earth moves around the Sun. To a French public used to quarrels between science and the Church, the scene needed no caption.
Robert-Fleury built his career on moments like that, the tense turning points of history rendered with careful drama in the academic manner taught at the Paris schools. He rose to the top of that world: professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, then its director from 1863, and later head of the French Academy in Rome.
He lived to 92, long enough to watch the Impressionists overturn much of what he had stood for. His son Tony Robert-Fleury became a history painter too, and taught at a private Paris studio, the Académie Julian, that trained the women still shut out of the state school.
