ABSTRACT
In 1863 Louis Viardot, journalist, translator, and former director of the Theatre des Italiens in Paris, was party to the discovery of some rolled-up canvases in a trunk in an attic in Baden-Baden: five bust-length, life-sized portraits in oil, three of men and two of women. Viardot himself had moved to the spa with his wife, the legendary singer Pauline Garcia, as a voluntary exile from France. Theodore Gericault's reputation in France, then as now, was colossal. The portrait moved Viardot to cite Voltaire, in his characterisation of envy: "sad lover of the dead, she hates the living". He may also have been drawing on Adolphe Lacheze's personal recollections of the patient. Lachèze would also have been the source of Viardot's assertion in his letter to Charles Blanc that there were originally ten portraits, that they were painted between 1820 and 1824.
