Le Retour de Marcus Sextus

Guerin showed this at the Paris Salon of 1799, only a few years after the Terror, and it made him famous overnight. The subject is nominally ancient Rome: a general named Marcus Sextus, banished during the dictator Sulla's purges, comes home from exile to find his wife dead and his daughter weeping at his knee. But everyone in the room understood it was really about France. The emigres, nobles and others who had fled the Revolution, were only then beginning to trickle back to a calmer country, many to ruined families and empty houses. Guerin never named the parallel, and he did not need to. Visitors reportedly hung garlands on the frame, reading their own recent losses in a grieving Roman who had never existed.