Chateaubriand Meditating on the Ruins of Rome

The writer Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand had just broken with Napoleon. He had served the new regime, then resigned in disgust after Napoleon had a royal prince, the Duc d'Enghien, shot in 1804. So Girodet painted him like this, standing among the broken columns of Rome, wind in his hair, one hand tucked into his coat, brooding and apart. Napoleon reportedly hated it, sneering that the sitter looked like a conspirator who had come down through a chimney. That was rather the point, a portrait of a famous man who had chosen to stand outside power. It hangs today in Saint-Malo on the coast of Brittany, the port town where Chateaubriand had been born some 40 years before.