Having entered Jacques-Louis David’s studio in 1785, Anne-Louis Girodet rapidly distinguished himself among the pupils of the foremost master of French Neoclassicism. By 1792, The Sleep of Endymion, painted in Rome the previous year (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. 4935), revealed a new artistic sensibility that, in many respects, anticipated Romanticism. Although Girodet established his reputation principally as a history painter, he also excelled as a portraitist, displaying an exceptional sensitivity to the psychology and character of his sitters.
Portrait of a Bearded Man Wearing a Bearskin Cap belongs to the small group of painted study heads that the artist retained in his studio, following David’s practice, for use as teaching models by his pupils. Unlike preparatory studies intended for a specific composition, such works belong to the tradition of academic exercises such as the half-length figure painted from life or the study of a torso. The modest dimensions of the present painting, together with its coarsely woven, irregular canvas, characteristic of works of this type, support this interpretation.
Girodet depicts a half-length figure gazing upwards in the expressive pose that recurs in several of his studies from the same period. Draped in a simple length of cloth, the anonymous model wears a bearskin cap, the composition’s sole narrative attribute. Reserved for elite infantry units and traditionally associated with the regulation beard, this distinctive headgear suggests that the sitter is a sapper of the grenadier company. Restricting his palette to a subtle harmony of browns, Girodet displays remarkable virtuosity in his rendering of contrasting textures, the beard, the fur, the drapery and the flesh, set against an abstract background built up through successive glazes, a technique inherited directly from David. Without abandoning the linear precision of his master, Girodet developed a freer and more intimate sensibility that would later appeal to admirers such as Honoré de Balzac. The sitter’s bare shoulder, revealing a powerfully modelled musculature, together with his assured bearing and gaze directed beyond the picture plane, enhances his imposing presence and contributes to an idealised vision of the soldier that Girodet evidently sought to convey.
The present study appears to have been executed contemporaneously with Ossian Receiving the French Heroes in His Celestial Palace (Rueil-Malmaison, Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison, inv. M.M.40.47.6955), commissioned in 1801 and completed the following year, one of Girodet’s earliest works to feature military uniforms. The presence of soldiers wearing bearskin caps in that composition lends further support to such a dating. Moreover, the signature, limited simply to “Girodet”, indicates an execution before 1809, the year in which the artist was formally adopted by Doctor Trioson and thereafter consistently signed his works “Girodet-Trioson”. The presence of such a signature on a modest study also suggests that the painting may have been presented by the artist to a close acquaintance, perhaps one of his pupils, or acquired by an early collector. According to the analysis proposed by Sidonie Lemeux-Fraitot, its first owner may have been an ancestor of Armand Verdier de Flaux, the French diplomat and poet (Uzès, 1819–1883), in whose collection the study was subsequently recorded.
The importance Girodet attached to the work is further demonstrated by its inclusion in his Album de principes de dessin (Montargis, Musée Girodet, inv. D77.1), in which he reproduced the lower part of the figure as a model for his pupils’ drawing exercises. The painting thus fulfilled a dual pedagogical function, serving both as a studio model and as an exemplar reproduced in the artist’s teaching manual.
