Portait of Two Young Men

In the years following Napoléon’s decisive defeat and abdication in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, artistic exchange between France and England would prove integral to the development of Romantic painting. In particular, the newfound ability of artists of the Romantic generation to travel to England would introduce French artists, including Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Horace Vernet, and Édouard Pingret, the artist of the present work, to a new, more informal style of portraiture developed by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Pingret’s chic portrait of two fashionably dressed young men has all the hallmarks of this new English style – the figures are posed informally, set within a landscape, and rendered in fluid brushwork. When it was exhibited at the Salon in 1831, the present work was described as a portrait of two brothers, and while the artist was known to have been painting in Normandy in 1831 neither the sitters nor the landscape have been identified.