Portrait d'un homme

Nobody knows who this man is. The Louvre calls the picture Portrait of a Man, known as the Vendean, and that second name is a tradition that attached itself later rather than anything recorded at the time. A Vendeen meant a peasant from the Vendee in western France who had risen against the Revolution in 1793, and by the 1820s, with the Bourbon kings back on the throne, those insurgents were being publicly honoured as loyal martyrs. Whether this sitter was one of them, or simply a bearded man in a black hat and blue coat whom somebody afterwards decided looked the part, the museum does not claim to know. Gericault painted him around 1822 and 1823, in the last couple of years of his life. The Louvre bought the canvas only in 1938.