Louis Gauffier

In 1793, after the execution of King Louis XVI, the Roman populace rioted against at the French community many of whom, including Gauffier, moved from Rome to Tuscany. The move prompted a marked shift in his art—he turned to landscape, working en plein air. This is evident in a series of views inspired by the Tuscan Abbey of Vallombrosa, where he spent the summer of 1796 (all 1797; two are now in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). Meanwhile, Gauffier increasingly turned to portraiture, cultivating sophisticated travellers visiting Florence as part of the Grand Tour. Painted on a small scale with refinement and a sense of intimacy with his subjects, Gauffier placed his sitters both in recognisably Italian landscapes as well as domestic interiors, often embellished with classical sculpture, furniture, or architectural fragments. Among his sitters are Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt (1793, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), Duke of Sussex (1794, Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe), Lord and Lady Holland (1794, private collections), the Painter Guillaume Joseph Coclers van Wyck (Musée Fabre, Montpellier), and Thomas Penrose (1798, Minneapolis Institute of Arts).

Lamentably, 1799 witnessed a period of strife in the Napoleonic wars; the Austrians occupied Florence, curtailing the artist’s clientele. With the return of the French in October 1800, foreigners resumed visits to the city, and they, along with French soldiers and diplomats, became Gauffier’s chief patrons. Yet his life ended shortly thereafter, at the age of just thirty-nine in October 1801. The Musée Fabre in Montpellier, founded by Gauffier’s dear friend François-Xavier, holds the single largest collection of his works, with over thirty paintings and many more drawings.