Portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette

Ary Scheffer's portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette of 1823 documents one of the most iconic figures of the Atlantic revolutionary age at a moment of complex retrospection. Lafayette had participated in both the American Revolution and the early phase of the French Revolution, and by the 1820s he was a living monument to liberal idealism, venerated in France and America alike. Scheffer was a Dutch-born painter working in France who specialized in literary, historical, and portraiture subjects with a Romantic sensibility. The portrait now hanging in the United States House of Representatives was painted at a time when Lafayette's liberal politics were again under pressure from the Restoration monarchy in France. The painting was given to the American Congress as a statement of Franco-American bonds, and it remains there as a symbolic object of transatlantic republican culture.

Scheffer employs a restrained, dignified portrait format appropriate to his subject's historical significance, with Lafayette positioned in three-quarter view against a plain background. The modeling is smooth and clear in the Neoclassical tradition, though Scheffer's characteristic softness gives the face a more Romantic warmth than strict Davidian practice would permit. The palette is sober and understated.