1798
Gouache, spots of acacia gum on the lower part
256 × 226 mm
Signed and dated on the lower right CL Clerisseau // 1798

This unpublished gouache is one of the artist’s last surviving works. It has not been possible to identify the monument – or the elements that compose it. If not mistaken, everything leads to the conclusion that the artist here is delivering an architectural caprice he is familiar with. The landscape, though seemingly fanciful, nevertheless conveys a certain elegiac feeling, accentuated by the disproportion between the tomb of the great man and the cripples who look at it, a feeling then fashionable in paintings of ruins, but which past revolutionary events and the great age of the artist also certainly explain.