Robert Jacques François Lefèvre (1755-1830),

• Was a French painter of portraits, history paintings and religious paintings.
• Robert Lefèvre made his first drawings on the papers of a procureur to whom his father had apprenticed him.
• With his parents' consent, he abandoned this apprenticeship and walked from Caen to Paris to become a student of Jean-Baptiste Regnault.
• In 1805, Lefèvre painted the portrait of Empress Joséphine, and in 1807 a matching portrait of Napoléon was painted by Louis-André-Gabriel Bouchet.
• Napoléon gave both paintings to the city of Aachen in 1807, where they are today in the city hall and decorate the entrance hall.
• On the Bourbon Restoration Robert Lefèvre painted a portrait of Louis XVIII for the Chambre des Pairs and received the cross of the Légion d'honneur and the title of First Painter to the King.
• While he was working on this last painting, the Revolution of July 1830 took place, an event which was to deprive him of his support and official posts. Ill, depressed and desperate, he committed suicide by cutting his throat at his house on the night of 2/3 October 1830.
• He was 75 years old. 

• He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris.

• Next