Bacchus as a child

The Salon of 1822 saw the success of the young Julle Duvidal de Montferrier, who established herself as one of the leading female figures in contemporary painting. Her Bacchus enfant, a dawn-lit rendering of a painting from the 1820 Amis des Arts exhibition, won her a great deal of acclaim. In a panorama where flower painting and portraiture dominated among women, she built her career on the frontier of history painting, a genre that propriety reserved for men. She compensated for the indispensable but forbidden teaching of nudes, and the need to keep away from the passions, by becoming the assistant of Baron Gérard, whose paintings she copied and learned from.
Mme Campan, director of the Maison d'éducation de la Légion d'honneur d'Écouen where Julie was raised, introduced the young girl to the best of society, starting with the d'Orléans family. The Duc d'Orléans, the future Louis-Philippe, a supporter of the Romantics from the very start of the movement, acquired Bacchus enfant at the Salon, endowed it with its impressive frame and gave it the honor of his famous gallery in the Palais-Royal. Julle Duvidal's collection included works by Eugène Devéria, Eugène Delacroix and Horace Vernet, but his painting was one of the only ones to escape the flames of the fire of February 1848, when Louis-Philippe was overthrown.
It appeared in the sale after the monarch's death, in 1851, where it was bought by Julie, who had become Countess Hugo since her marriage in 1827 to Abel Hugo, the poet's eldest son, whom she had met through Adèle Foucher, Victor Hugo's young wife and teacher. The painting then passed into the collection of Orléans-born François Marcille, whom he had probably met thirty years earlier. This pioneer in the rediscovery of the 18th century was also close to the Romantics, and had entrusted Eugène Devéria with the training of his son Eudoxe, who from 1870 to 1890 was to become the great director of the Musée d'Orléans. No doubt in this mythical Bacchus he rediscovered the time of ideals, before Julle Hugo had to put away her brushes, her status as Countess no longer allowing her to work as a professional painter.