Portrait of Giovanni Battista Sommariva

Prud'hon painted this in 1813, the year Napoleon's army came back from Russia, and by the time it was shown in public the Empire had fallen. It went to the Salon of 1814, the first one held after the abdication. The sitter, Giovanni Battista Sommariva, was a lawyer's son from a small town near Lodi who had run Milan for two years under the Cisalpine Republic, lost the job to a nobleman Napoleon preferred, and moved to Paris with his money, where he became the most sought-after buyer of modern art in the city. The two marbles beside him in the picture are his, a Palamedes and a Terpsichore by Canova, who once had a letter from him calling the Terpsichore his bride. That marble is now at the Magnani-Rocca foundation near Parma. The portrait came to the Brera in 1873 with the bequest of Elena Sommariva Seilliere, and hangs in Room 37.