Histories of the self: Anne-Louis Girodet and The Trioson Portrait Series

Abstract

In 1804 the French painter Anne-Louis Girodet drew a small post-mortem portrait of Benoît-Agnès Trioson, the sole biological child of the artist's mentor, Benoît-François Trioson (fig. 1). The boy's wavy hair is rendered in fluid, decisive streaks of charcoal, but his facial features-the contours of his jaw, lips, nose, and eye-are much harder to make out. The boy seems to fade from view, as if the artist had moved quickly to record his features one last time before they slipped away altogether. The drawing serves as a postscript, of sorts, to a trio of painted portraits Girodet executed of the young Benoît-Agnès in 1797 (fig. 2), 1800 (fig. 3), and 1803 (fig. 4), a portrait series that was abruptly brought to a close with the child's untimely death in 1804. Both in their serial treatment of a young child and in their precarious placement between the final throes of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon's First Empire, the paintings are rare documents of the affective terrain of boyhood at the end of the eighteenth century. Girodet paid exceptionally close attention to the physical and psychic particularities of youth and in doing so reflected, it has been argued, a dreamy, rebellious, and melancholic vision of childhood memorably articulated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile of 1762. i This notion of childhood was similarly bound up in evolving philosophical, social, and political changes underway within the bourgeois model of the nuclear family. ii But childhood was not merely a topic of interest for its own stake; it was a concept freighted with the competing claims about equality, freedom, and morality that had urgent political stakes at the twilight of the eighteenth century.