The Sleeping Hermit

Vien's career began relatively late, when he arrived in Paris in 1740 (at the age of 24), after years spent working for food in the South of France. It took him just three years in Natoire's workshop to win the Prix de Rome in 1743, which enabled him to travel to the Eternal City from 1745 to 1750.

Attracted more by the antiques and naturalism of the Bolognese painters than by the Baroque artists, during his stay in Rome he laid the foundations for the neoclassicism that would blossom on his return to Paris with his pupils Suvée, Vincent and above all Jacques-Louis David.

This taste for realism without emphasis is perfectly perceptible in this study of an old man, which he produced in Rome in 1750, at the same time as theSleeping Hermit (Paris, Musée du Louvre). The model, a musician he had met in a working-class neighborhood, had already posed three years earlier for one of the sketches in the Life of Saint Martha cycle (Tarascon). In his memoirs, Vien recounts how, one day, while posing for his model, the latter fell asleep with his violin in his hands. Seduced by this natural, picturesque attitude, he immediately drew from it the great painting in the Louvre.

In the same year, the painting attracted considerable attention at the exhibition of painters from the Académie de Saint-Luc at the Panthéon, then in Paris at the Salon of 1753. The critics praised the imitation of nature and the serious realism of this hermit, whose Orleans version includes a few variations. Preferring a tighter framing, focusing on the old man's physiognomy, Vien replaced the violin held by his model with a skull, which he used as background decoration in the final version. The slightly more upside-down head accentuates the memento mori dimension of this painting, which appears as a serene reflection on death.

Vien's return to Paris, with this painting in particular, marked a decisive turning point in the history of painting.

His penchant for the rigor of the antique and naturalism positioned him, from the moment he was admitted to the Académie in 1754, as the painter young painters wanted to join to escape the excesses of rococo.