Gros & Girodet : chemins croisés
Auteur(s) : Sidonie Lemeux-Fraitot (dir.)
Exhibition at the Musée Girodet, Montargis, 11 December 2024 – 16 March 2025
Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835) was the most loyal classmate and one of the best friends of Anne-Louis Girodet, known as Girodet-Trioson (1767–1824). The famous speech he improvised in tears at Girodet's grave remains a symbol of romantic sensibility and sincere, unique affection.
The post-mortem inventories of Gros and Girodet's works, published jointly in 2002, revealed the brotherhood of their networks within the phalanx of the "four Gs " (Guérin, Girodet, Gérard, Gros), as contemporary critics called them. Their travels in Italy and their shared aspiration to renew the representation of battles had already been highlighted in previous exhibitions at the Girodet Museum.
This exhibition catalogue ambitiously and thoroughly illustrates these cross-influences, works and shared tastes that were so important to 19th-century art, with Girodet's exclamation, ‘Gros is happy, he has the wrist of his talent,’ as its guiding thread and the self-portraits that the two artists exchanged before parting ways in Italy in 1794 as its emblems.
