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Louis Lafitte Biography
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A student of both the painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault and the printmaker Gilles Demarteau, Louis Lafitte won the Prix de Rome in 1791 with a painting of The Return of Regulus to Carthage. (He was, in fact, the last student sent to the French Academy in Rome during the reign of Louis XVI.) In Italy, he joined a group of pensionnaires that included Anne-Louis Girodet, Charles Meynier, François-Xavier Fabre and Jacques Réattu, and with them spent most of the period of the Terror living and studying in Rome, Florence and Naples. Having made his Salon debut in 1791, when he exhibited a number of drawings, he continued to exhibit there regularly after his return from Rome in 1796 and until 1817. Awarded one of the second prizes in the great concours de l’an II, held in the Year II of the Republic in 1793-1794, Lafitte enjoyed an active and varied career. He participated in the decoration of the dining room at Malmaison, to which he contributed a series of allegorical frescoes, and also designed wallpaper for the chateau, including several on the subject of Psyche. Appointed dessinateur du cabinet du roi by Louis XVIII in 1815, Lafitte also produced a number of designs for Sèvres porcelain and for the goldsmith Charles Cahier, and between 1802 and 1815 provided a series of designs for medals commemorating Napoleon and the important events of the Empire, commissioned by Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon as Director of the Mint.
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While the works that Lafitte exhibited at the Salon included history paintings and portraits, as well as an occasional landscape, the majority of his submissions were highly finished drawings. These were of religious and allegorical scenes, as well as history subjects and portraits, and earned the artist a considerable reputation. Many of his drawings were intended as designs for book illustrations or prints, often with specific Revolutionary themes. Lafitte also produced a superb series of drawings for the new Republican calendar, decreed by the Convention in 1793, with each month represented by an allegorical female figure. During the Restoration, Lafitte was appointed dessinateur du cabinet du roi by Charles X, and in this capacity produced a number of large and highly finished drawings of The Coronation of Charles X, now in the Louvre. Other drawings by Lafitte are today in the museums of Angers, Montpellier, Pontoise and Rouen, as well as in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
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