Portrait of the painter Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (1803-1860)

This posthumous portrait, exhibited at the Salon of 1876, may have been started as early as 1860, when Decamps died, and evolved over the years to become a kind of culmination of Auguste Préault's research. Both great figures of Romanticism from the 1820s onwards, the painter Decamps and the sculptor Préault, each in his own medium, shared a common taste for the terribilitàwhich manifests itself in two of the most powerful works of the 19th century: The Battle of the Cimbres (1833, Musée du Louvre, former collection of the Duc d'Orléans) and Killing (1834/1854, Chartres, Musée des Beaux-Arts), a disheveled Romanticism that reformulates the issues of representation.

While the sculptor displayed the same expressive power in ronde-bosse and relief, the medallion remained a format he had already exploited in 1842 in Le Silence pour la tombe de Jacob Roblès, whose high-relief principle he adopted in this portrait of Decamps. The art of the medallion enjoyed its heyday during this period, notably under the impetus of David d'Angers, and Préault pushed the limits by exploiting the expressive potential of relief. Beyond the bumps on the skull, whose exaggerated treatment harkens back to phrenological studies that link these deformities to character traits, he turns the painter's beard into a veritable battlefield evoking the chaos of the Battle of the Cimbres.

The identification of this medallion could have been lost without its context of entry into the collections.

Préault describes it under the heading Portrait of M... at the 1876 Salon, where his Ophélie monopolizes critical attention. Eudoxe Marcille, director of the Museum from 1870 to 1890, and always offensive towards donations of works by modern artists, obtained this large patinated plaster for the Musée d'Orléans, where it entered as a fantasy head, but with the reputation, which has remained, of being a portrait of Decamps, confirmed by its resemblance to the painter's last years.