Monsieur Meyer

In the winter of 1795 French armies crossed the frozen rivers of Holland, the old Dutch Republic fell, and a new Batavian Republic took its place. It sent envoys to Paris to work out an alliance with France, and Gaspard Meyer, one of them, ordered this portrait from David. The painter had only lately come out of prison, locked up twice after the fall of his ally Robespierre. He signed the canvas in the revolutionary calendar, Anno IV, the year that began in the autumn of 1795. Meyer sits at his papers, quill in hand, in a dark blue coat over the scarlet waistcoat that gave the picture its other name, The Man in the Red Waistcoat. For reasons nobody knows, he never collected it. It stayed with David's descendants for decades and reached the Louvre in 1953 from the collector Carlos de Beistegui.