François-Pascal-Simon Baron Gérard

In the artist's family, until 1980;

Anonymous sale, Christie's, Monaco, 19 June 1994, lot 76;

Where acquired by the present owner.

Gérard’s Homer was conceived as the pendant to Belisarius, a painting made a few years earlier. The complete composition is now only known to us from an engraving: anticipated at the Salon in 1814, in the end the painting was never revealed to the public: the artist himself refused to show it and went as far as destroying it a few years later – but only partially, according to a suggestion made by Alain Latreille...

Several contemporary descriptions nevertheless evoke an exceptional painting: Charles-Paul Landon devoted a whole article to it in his review of the 1814 Salon, expressing regret that the artist had ‘deprived the public of the sight of this new work’ (C.-P. Landon, Annales du Musée et de l'école moderne des beaux-arts. Salon de 1814, Paris, 1814, pp. 91–92, pl. 65). He reproduced the engraving of it.

The date that the work was destroyed remains uncertain: Michelet saw it when he visited the Galerie Leuchtenberg in 1842 and described it in his Journal; while in 1856, Henri Gérard, the artist’s nephew, declared that the painting had been ‘destroyed by its author’ (H. Gérard, Œuvre du baron François Gérard, 1789-1836: tableaux

Part II, Paris, 1856, no pagination).

Alain Latreille suggests that our painting is the sole remaining fragment of the composition, Gérard having chosen to preserve only the figure of Euplocamie, the most admired and original element of the painting.

In the traditional version of Herodotus’s account, it was Glaucus who came to the aid of Homer, rather than his daughter. According to Herodotus, when Homer learned that Thestorides had stolen his poems, he left by boat for Chios. After the fishermen who conveyed him there left him on the shore, the blind Homer wandered around the island until he was attacked by dogs guarding a flock of sheep. It was then that Glaucus came to his rescue.

Baron Gérard chose instead a more contemporary version of the episode by Louis-Népomucène Lemercier, narrated in his poem

Homère, Alexandre, published in 1800, which substituted Euplocamie for her father. Gérard thus hoped to emphasize the contrast between the figure of old age represented by Homer and that of youth embodied by Euplocamie. It was this contrast which, in the artist’s lifetime, was most admired. It seems entirely consistent that Gérard, while dissatisfied with his composition in general, would nevertheless have wished to preserve this fragment which he too must have thought a worthy example of his work.