Among the gifted French painters of the latter half of the 18th century, Jacques Gamelin is unusual for his refusal to make his career in Paris, choosing instead to work in Lanquedoc and Southwestern France. His early artistic training with Jean-Pierre Rivalz in Toulouse was followed in 1764 by a brief period in the Parisian studio of Jean-Baptiste Deshays. Gamelin travelled to Italy under the auspices of a patron in Toulouse, the Baron de Puymaurin, and remained there for ten years. Admitted into the Accademia di San Luca in 1771 as a painter of battle scenes, by the age of 32 he had become the official painter to Pope Clement XIV. On his return to France in 1775, Gamelin settled first in Toulouse, where he established a school of dissection and in 1779 published an anatomical treatise, and later in Montpellier. He produced a large body of work of considerable variety and originality, including several paintings for churches in Carcassonne and elsewhere. Commissioned to paint four large canvases for the church of St. Just in Narbonne, Gamelin remained there throughout the period of the Revolution. In 1796 he was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Ecole Centrale de l’Aude in his hometown of Carcassonne, where he ended his career.
The largest collections of drawings by Gamelin are in the museums of Narbonne and Carcassonne, and others are in the Musée Fabre at Montpellier, the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse and elsewhere. In America, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence each have drawings by the artist.
The present sheet depicts an event from the life of King Louis IX, later St. Louis (1214-1270). After recovering from a serious illness, Louis decided to embark on a Holy Crusade and in 1248 sailed from the port of Aigues-Mortes with his army, bound for Cyprus.
Gamelin is known to have received a commission from the religious confraternity of the Penitents Bleus of Narbonne for a series of canvases depicting the life of St. Louis, completed in 1789, on which this drawing may be based. Three other drawings by Gamelin of Louis at Aigues-Mortes are known, two of which depict a composition different to that of the present sheet (2). Another drawing, similar in composition to the present drawing but of smaller dimensions, was on the Paris art market in 1986 (3).
A companion drawing of Louis IX at the Battle of Damietta, of similar dimensions, is in a French private collection (4).
Notes
1. A list of drawings by Gamelin in provincial museum collections in France is given in Paris, Grand Palais, Le Néo-Classicisme français: Dessins des Musées de Province, exhibition catalogue, 1974-1975, p.148.
2. Photographs of each are in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, although no location is given. These are probably the drawings of this subject in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Narbonne, each dated 1788, listed in Paris, Grand Palais, ibid., p.148.
3. Paris, Paul Prouté, Catalogue 'Primatice', 1968, no.29.
4. New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1991, no.48.
