Possibly Charles Raymond Chabrillac Peasants of the French Revolution

An original early 19th-century watercolour painting, Possibly Charles Raymond Chabrillac, Peasants of the French Revolution.

A sensitively drawn and thought-provoking image, possibly by the French artist Charles Raymond Chabrillac (b.1804). The narrative of the scene is ambiguous, but the figures are clearly members of the peasant class—the largest socio-economic group in France until the mid-20th century.

Charles Raymond Chabrillac was active in Paris from the 1820s onwards. He was a pupil of Guillaume Guillon Lethiere and attended the Salon de Paris for various periods between 1833 and 1842. His most well-known paintings are a series of portraits of some of the protagonists of the French Revolution.

Whilst this is neither a scene of peasant revolt nor Napoleonic battle, there are overtones of both in this quiet composition. The peasant farmers, members of the Third Estate, played a major role in starting the French Revolution in 1789, having increasingly suffered under heavy taxation, rising food prices, poor harvests and unfairness of the feudal system. The male figure to the left is evidently a working man, who—significantly—wears the baggy long trousers of the sans-culottes—the working class Revolutionaries who pitted themselves against the fashionable silk knee-breech-wearing nobility and bourgeoisie. The generally brown/black palette of the drawing is accented with touches of bright blue and red bodycolour, colours of the Revolution.

The mood of the painting is one of watching and waiting. The composition emphatically sets light against dark. The male figure looks out through the heavy stone archway to a vista of luminous sky: contemplating, perhaps, what is to come and what has been before. Whilst the Revolution brought abolition of the feudal system and fairer distribution of taxes, hardship continued for the peasant class in many ways. Mass conscription, the levée en masse, during the Napoleonic wars would result in the death of hundreds of thousands of their sons across Europe—battling to defend the new state that their revolution had created.

Provenance: From the Collection of Dr E.M. Brett of Hampstead. Abbott & Holder, 30 Museum Street, WC1A 1LH.

In watercolour with charcoal and bodycolour.