Charles-Paul Landon : Peintre et critique d'art

This monographic work is devoted to Charles-Paul Landon (1760-1826), a painter and art critic under the Empire. He is still known as a painter today thanks to his Daedalus and Icarus, the crowning achievement of an art that is both spare and refined, with fresh colours and pale tones, a blend of Antiquity and Raphael. As an intermediary between artists and men of letters, both himself and others, he rubbed shoulders with a whole society eager for exchange and harmony.

Described by his contemporaries as a ‘giant’, he found his true calling in writing: he was one of the first curators and art historians in the modern sense of the term, and the importance of his writings is still widely acknowledged, foremost among them the Annales du musée, a fundamental work at the time presenting the masterpieces of the Louvre and other collections, which travelled the world as far as Canton, a rare occurrence at the time.