Nicolas-Antoine Taunay: The Entry of Napoleon Bonaparte
and the French Army into Munich, 24th October 1805
Up until 1805, when Napoleon “freed” Munich in the War of the Second Coalition and made Maximilian king of Bavaria, that nation had repeatedly been a theater of war and had suffered the disastrous consequences. Only after Napoleon’s defeat in the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 did Bavaria enjoy a period of peace.
The son of a painter for the porcelain factory at Sèvres, France, Taunay began studying painting at age 13. His teachers included Francesco Casanova, whose landscape and history paintings inspired Taunay’s own subject matter. Taunay worked in a Neoclassical style throughout his career, producing landscapes and genre scenes as well as biblical, mythological, and history paintings.
Taunay was best known for his landscapes; as a young painter in Paris, he often worked out-of-doors. In 1804 Taunay was one of several artists chosen to portray the events of the Napoleonic campaign in Germany. Following the collapse of the regime, he joined the 1816 French artistic mission to Brazil, a small group of artists, architects, and civil engineers. Portugal’s King John VI, who was living in exile in Brazil, invited the mission to create an academy of arts and sciences and to introduce Neoclassicism to Rio de Janeiro. During his time in Brazil, Taunay made many paintings that recorded the landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and its environs. [summarized from Encyclopedia Brittanica]
In the 1790s Taunay produced this amazing - and chilling - canvas:
Triumph of the Guillotine
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