Septimius Severus and Caracalla

On 23 July 1769 Greuze brought this canvas to the Royal Academy of Painting as his reception piece, the work that would fix his rank. He wanted to enter as a history painter, the highest class, and he took a Roman subject from the historian Cassius Dio. During a campaign in northern Britain, the young Caracalla had reined in his horse and drawn his sword behind his father's back. Afterwards the ailing emperor Septimius Severus called him in, had a sword placed within reach, and told him that if he wanted to kill him he could do it there and then.

Greuze paints that moment. Severus, bare-chested, half-rises from his bed and points at his son standing at its foot, the sword lies on the round table, and two courtiers talk quietly at the side. The Academy voted him in that day as a genre painter only, a verdict delivered in front of him. Seized in the Revolution, the painting hung at Saint-Cloud and Meudon before it came to the Louvre in 1848.