Catalogue-2014-Jean-Luc-Baroni

several times for her loyalty to the family of Louis XVI 7 , narrowly escaping death on each occasion, or the
picture commemorating the return to France of Madame de Genlis (1746-1830) in 1801 8 . What incident
could have lead Robert to do something similar in the present Sack of an Ancient Pyramid?
Napoleon invaded Egypt in July 1798, issuing a proclamation that he had come to restore liberty and
uphold Islam. After an easy capture of Alexandria, the French advanced up the Nile, destroyed the Mameluke
army at the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 st July, and entered Cairo. Always ambivalent to the new
order and its considerable achievements, which he judged to be as ignorant as it was opulent 9 , Robert
was not above hunting with the hounds and running with the hares. A large canvas (signed and dated
1798) with a diminishing vista of pyramids and obelisks and surrounded by dancing and singing figures,
in The Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, may represent his “official” view of the Egyptian campaign, while
the present canvas may be a more private meditation on the pernicious effects of marauding armies -
expressed anachronistically by the Roman sarcophagus cascading from the hands of grave-robbers - on
those “ossuaries of Antiquity” that he loved so much. 10
The group of figures with a man trying to restrain a rearing horse in the middle foreground was most
probably inspired by Guillaume Coustou’s acclaimed two monumental marbles of a rearing horse of
1743-45, which were originally executed for Marly, but moved in 1794 to the Place de la Concorde in
Paris, and now in the Louvre (fig.2).
2. Guillaume Coustou, Rearing Horse,
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
actual size detail
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