Jean-Simon Berthélemy

Jean-Simon Berthélemy (5 March 1743 – 1 March 1811) was a French history painter who was commissioned to paint allegorical ceilings for the Palais du Louvre, the Luxembourg Palace and others,[1] in a conservative Late Baroque-Rococo manner only somewhat affected by Neoclassicism.

An early commission was for a suite of decorative paintings under the direction of the architect Jean-Gabriel Legendre for the Hôtel de l'Intendance de Champagne at Châlons-sur-Marne, of which the artist only completed six overdoors, much in the manner of François Boucher, and delegated the rest of the commission to a fellow pupil at the Académie.

[3] Berthélemy was an esteemed painter in his day, chosen to join the entourage accompanying Napoleon's campaign in Italy, where he was among the experts assigned the task of selecting works of art to be transferred to Paris under terms of the Treaty of Tolentino, February 1797.

When two monographs on Berthélemy were published in 1979,[4] Philip Conisbee, reviewing them in The Burlington Magazine,[5] observed drily: "Two monographs on Berthélemy is overkill for a painter who could have been dispatched with a single substantial article.

The French academic system of art education in the eighteenth century, backed up by the stimulus of church and state patronage, was so efficient and rigorous that even an average talent could be sufficiently conditioned to produce a handful of decent history-paintings, which are sometimes minor masterpieces."