Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
A rank named exactly
Most military portraits in this catalogue name a general, a marshal or a monarch. This one names a second lieutenant, the bottom of the commissioned ladder, and files the work under male portraiture and Animal Art > Horse. That combination is worth pausing on. The mounted portrait was a format for the top of a hierarchy; applied to a junior officer it stops asserting supremacy and starts asserting membership, a man entitled to a horse in an army where the horse divided one arm of service from another.
What the record holds
The date of creation is 1810 and the location is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), in Los Angeles. The dimensions are not recorded. Neoclassicism is the style term on the record and French the nationality; the measured colour family of the image is ochre.
What the catalogue cannot supply
No regiment, no engagement and no later career appears in the record. A title of this precision invites exactly that kind of detail, and supplying it from elsewhere is what this site declines to do. The sitter's rank is recorded. Everything past it is not.
Sources
4 references- Antoine-Jean Gros — Wikipedia
Antoine-Jean Gros (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃twanʒɑ̃ gʁo]; 16 March 1771 – 25 June 1835) was a French painter of historical subjects. He was granted the title of Baron Gros in 1824. Gros studied under Jacques-Louis David in Paris and began a
- Gros, Antoine-Jean — Getty ULAN
French painter, 1771-1835
- Portrait of Second Lieutenant Charles Legrand — Wikidata
description: painting by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros; inception: 1810-00-00; dimensions: +249 × +162 cm; collection: Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- collections.lacma.org — record for "Portrait of Second Lieutenant Charles Legrand"
Primary source record for this work (collections.lacma.org).
