Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours

These are in a Neoclassical style, several with large groups of figures, inevitably drawing comparison with the works of his contemporary Jacques-Louis David, who was four years older.

After the French Revolution, Saint-Ours returned to Geneva and entered politics, initially as a keen supporter of revolutionary ideas.

He continued his studies in Paris in 1769, with Joseph-Marie Vien, in whose studio he met David and was exposed to radical political thinking.

In the first Paris Salon under the Revolution, in 1791, he exhibited three small versions of what he seems to have intended to be a group of four large paintings showing the manners of different ancient peoples, and also the four Ages of Man.

[6] The Selection of Children in Sparta (Le Choix des enfants de Sparte), based on a story in Plutarch,[7] shows a combination of the severe moralizing impulses of Neoclassicism and the contemporary cult of "sentiment" in the figure at left of the exiting father whose infant has failed the selection; the baby is retained for later exposure.

[10] But, disillusioned by developments in France, in 1796 he retired from political involvements and returned to painting, producing mostly portraits of the Genevan elite.

He also drew and painted Italianate landscapes, some with the landscape round Geneva reimagined as a classical scene, as in La ville de Genève idéalisée à l’antique avec le tombeau de Rousseau ("The city of Geneva idealized in antique style, with the tomb of Rousseau"), c.