Portrait of André Chenier, oil on canvas. Annotation on back - Lot 341

Portrait of André Chenier, oil on canvas. Annotation on back: "André Chenier, Poète mort à l'échafaud 1794". Note: An heir of the Enlightenment, André Chénier was involved in the political polemics of the French Revolution, and belonged to the constitutional movement. He was an admirer of 1789, but violently opposed to Jacobinism and Robespierre, while rejecting royalism. In the ideological climate of the Terror, just as Jean-Baptiste Coffinhal declared to Antoine Lavoisier: "The Republic has no need of scientists or chemists", Fouquier-Tinville addressed Chénier with the famous phrase: "The Republic has no need of poets". An emblematic victim of the guillotine, Chénier was executed on Thermidor 7, Year II, two days before the fall of Robespierre, along with the poets Jean-Antoine Roucher and Frédéric de Trenck. On the eve of his death, he is said to have composed La Jeune captive, inspired by his muse Aimée de Coigny, a major text of late XVIIIᵉ century revolutionary poetry.