The Return of Marcus Sextus
Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833) · 1799
A Roman exile comes home to find his wife dead. He sits slumped at the foot of her bed, one hand pressed to his brow, the other held by his daughter who has collapsed weeping across his knees. The dead woman lies in profile under a white sheet, lit like a piece of sculpture. Marcus Sextus is not a historical person at all; the subject was invented, apparently by Guérin's circle, and given a Roman name to slip past the censors.
Everything is arranged for maximum legibility. The three figures form a closed triangle in a dark, almost bare interior, with a single shaft of light picking out the corpse, the daughter's arm and the father's face. Guérin was a pupil of Regnault and worked in a manner very close to David's, all firm contour and controlled surface, but the emotional register is softer and more sentimental. Notice how little of the room you are given: a bed, a lamp, a fold of curtain. The painter wants nothing to compete with the grief.
When it was shown at the Salon of 1799, Parisians understood it instantly as a picture about the émigrés returning after the Terror to find their families destroyed, and the canvas was crowned with a laurel wreath by the crowd. Guérin was a twenty-five-year-old who had not yet taken up his Prix de Rome. He went on to teach both Géricault and Delacroix, whose enormous canvases hang a room away, which makes this modest picture a useful hinge between Neoclassicism and Romanticism.
Did You Know? Visitors to the Salon of 1799 crowned the canvas with a laurel wreath, treating a wholly fictitious Roman as a stand-in for France's returning exiles.
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