Self Portrait as a Young Man
Baron Dominique Vivant Denon French
Not on view
In a career spanning a tumultuous period of French history, Vivant Denon held an impressive variety of posts, including diplomat and museum director. His graphic skills would serve many purposes throughout his career, from recording condemned aristocrats on the way to the guillotine to documenting Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798. Here, many years before the French Revolution, he portrayed himself in a softly lit interior as a young artist working on a drawing.
As Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey pointed out in 2015 (see references), this drawings seems to have been the model for an etching by Denon, where the head alone appears in reverse direction (see 22.69.21).
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