Adolphe Thiers (1796-1877).

Adolphe Thiers was one of the most consequential French statesmen of the nineteenth century: historian, journalist, politician, and the first President of the Third Republic who suppressed the Paris Commune of 1871. Bonnat painted his portrait in 1876, the year before Thiers's death, when the statesman was eighty years old and had just resigned the presidency. The commission represented the highest level of official portraiture — a former head of state at the end of an extraordinary career spanning from the Napoleonic era to the birth of the Republic. As the Third Republic's leading portrait painter, Bonnat was the natural choice for such a commission. Thiers's reputation was deeply ambivalent: celebrated as a Republican founder, he was reviled by the left for the brutal repression of the Commune.

Oil on canvas in Bonnat's controlled mature style. The aged face of the eighty-year-old statesman is rendered with unflinching observation, the physical reality of extreme old age treated as evidence of a long and consequential public life.