Romantic school View of the rue Royale and the place Louis XVI, Paris, ca. 1826 Oil on canvas View of Rue Royale and Place de la Concorde in Paris, ca. 1836, oil on canvas, Romantic School 84.25 x 80.70 in. 214 x 205 cm Provenance: Collection of Madame Roussel ; Sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Mes Lair-Dubreuil et Baudoin, 25-28 March 1912, no. 26 (as Richard Parkes Bonington) Although we know the story of the construction of the Place Louis XV by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the tragedies that took place there at the end of the 18th century and the event that was the erection of the Luxor obelisk in 1836, the fate of the site under the Restoration is resolutely ignored. It was under the Directoire that it was christened Place de la Concorde, a name retained by the Consulate and the Empire before the Restoration restored it to its former role as a royal square. Louis XVIII wanted to restore this majestic square to its former role as an expression of monarchical grandeur, without forgetting the events of the Revolution. To this end, a solemn mass was celebrated on 10 April 1814 in memory of the victims of the Revolution. A law was passed on 10 January 1816 to reinstate the royal statues in Paris, renaming Place Louis XV Place de la Concorde and commissioning a new statue of the Beloved. An order from Charles X changed this order in April 1826, renaming the square Louis XVI. A statue of the martyred King was then commissioned from Jean-Pierre Cortot by decree on 31 May 1827. Six metres high and depicting Louis XVI in coronation regalia, it was intended to be installed in the centre of the square, with its back to the Chamber of Deputies and looking towards the Madeleine church, designed by Louis XVIII as an expiatory monument to the memory of the royal family. Completed in 1830, the statue never saw the light of day and the model was destroyed in the foundry during the July Days. The 1/3-scale model is preserved at the Château de Versailles (no. MV 1355.1), while the Musée Carnavalet holds a drawing by Pierre Simon Duvivier based on Cortot's work (no. D.8915). The base of the monument, designed by Jean-Louis Grillon, was installed and the foundation stone laid by Charles X on 3 May 1826. Its silhouette is known from a print of the planned monument in the Musée Carnavalet (fig. 1). The orphaned plinth that reigned over the Place Louis XVI until the advent of the July Monarchy was replaced by another, made of five blocks of pink granite from Brittany, designed to house a monument of much lesser political importance. It is said that Grillon saved its base during the Trois Glorieuses by hastily inscribing 'Monument à la Charte', after the short-lived name that the square took on. Our painting is thus a never-before-seen representation of a short period in the history of the Place de la Concorde (1826-1830), and reveals the extent to which the Parisian landscape changed with each of the regimes that succeeded one another in France over the course of the long nineteenth century. The scene is a lively composition by an artist influenced by the English pleinairists, particularly Richard Parkes Bonington, who died in 1828. This, at least, is revealed by the nuanced treatment of the sky, whose instability is entirely Romantic. On the ground, the people of Paris are busy on horse-drawn carriages or on foot amidst monuments whose silhouettes suffer from approximation. The height of Jules-Hardouin Mansart's dome at Les Invalides is astonishing, while in the distance, between the Hôtel de la Marine and the Hôtel de Coislin, the Rue Royale opens onto the colonnade of the Palais Bourbon, which has eight columns instead of twelve. This confusion echoes the conclusion of another 19th-century monument: at the end of Bel-Ami, Georges Duroy emerges from the Madeleine and looks longingly at the Chamber of Deputies, 'and it seemed to him that he was about to leap from the portico of the Madeleine to the portico of the Palais Bourbon'. Fig. 1: Anonymous engraver, printed by Piaget and Lailavoix, Vingt-un Janvier, Vue du Monument projeté pour la Place Louis XV, lithograph published in the newspaper 'Le Revenant', Musée Carnavalet (no. QB.15). Romantic school 214 x 205 cm