Louis-André-Gabriel Bouchet
Louis -André -Gabriel Bouchet (* 1759 in Paris, † 1842) was a French portrait and history painter of classicism.
Life and work
Louis -André -Gabriel Bouchet was a student of Jacques -Louis David's École des Beaux -Arts. In 1797 he was awarded the Prix de Rome. Bouchet presented by the year 1819 his works in the Salon de Paris. Nowadays the majority of his works, among others in the Musée Granet in Aix en Provence, the Musée de Picardie in Amiens, the Musée des Beaux -Arts in Angers, Musée Municipaux in Compiegne, the Institute of Arts in Detroit, the Musée de Peinture is listed et de Sculpture in Grenoble and the Grand Trianon at Versailles and exhibited. The Detroit works were part of a larger composition, in which the image of the family is the center.
The Odyssey of the portraits of Napoleon and Josephine
On behalf of Emperor Napoleon I. Bouchet made in 1807, whose portrait as a counterpart to the work of the Empress Joséphine in which Robert Lefèvre was created in 1805. Napoleon gave these two portraits on December 6, 1807, the city of Aachen, whose inauguration was held on June 1, 1809 with a ceremony held the eulogy at the mayor Cornelius von Guaita and prefect Jean Charles François de Ladoucette.
After Napoleon's abdication, the two works were first stored in a " shed ". King Friedrich Wilhelm III. finally ordered the painting because of their art historical value to Berlin. The two portraits were then packaged by the Aachen artist Johann Ferdinand Jansen and sent to the Director of the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts, Johann Gottfried Schadow in Berlin in December of 1816
In the meantime, these portraits were then for a time in the Berlin City Palace. After a visit to the Aachen Mayor Edmund Emundts on October 15, 1840 at King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Emundts received the painting in the same year on December 11 and had them back in the Aachen Rathaus up. Friedrich Wilhelm IV could be established then a year later by Carl Schmid copies of the portraits.
On 12 February 1878, decorated the first exhibition of the Aachen Museum Association in the redoubt Komphausbadstraße. As part of the foundation of his Foundation for the establishment of a museum in Aachen in 1882 presented the Aachen entrepreneur and art patron Barthold Suermondt the condition that the paintings should be integrated into the stock of the new museum. Over many decades, they were then in Suermondt Ludwig Museum and hang again from 2011 in the Council Chamber of the City Hall Aachen.