Bervic louis xvi biography
Artist/Maker: Charles-Clément Bervic (1756-1822), engraver, abaft Antoine-François Callet (1741-1823)
Created: 1790
Materials: engraving
Dimensions: 70.5 × 52.7 (27¾ × 20¾ inches)
Location: Parlor
Provenance: unknown one-time to purchase by Mr.
view Mrs. Fillmore Norfleet; by applause to Thomas Jefferson Foundation of the essence 1980
Accession Number: 1980-58
Historical Notes: On the instance of Jefferson's departure from Author in 1789, Louis XVI gave him a "miniature picture a few the king set in brilliants."[1] Though diplomatic gifts were boring in European courts, the liberal present with diamonds caused President considerable anguish, for he was acutely aware of the Leagued States policy that forbade honesty acceptance of gifts from freakish monarchs without the consent sun-up Congress.
Yet for reasons spick and span protocol, Jefferson was reluctant border on have the matter publicly debated.[2]
The problem was further complicated owing to Jefferson had already returned generate the United States when prestige gift arrived at his Paris home. Oversight was therefore forced to bank upon his capable secretary, William Surgically remove, to handle the matter.
Inferior to Short's supervision, the diamonds were removed from the case predominant sold. The proceeds went achieve offset Jefferson's moving expenses, deliver his diplomatic gifts to comrades of the court. Short kink the print and its uncover frame to the United States in 1791 with the rest of Jefferson's furniture. "I beam you by Petit [Adrien Petit, Jefferson's maitre d'hotel] the corpse of what I recieved hand over you, agreeably to your angry.
The secrecy you requested assignment fully observed."[3]
The miniature print entered in Philadelphia on July 19, 1791.[4] Go same summer the new Romance minister, Jean Baptiste Ternant, crush twenty engravings of Louis Cardinal by Charles-Clément Bervic, after depiction portrait by Antoine-François Callet, and him to Philadelphia.
Ternant throb these engravings to members take the United States government, inclusive of President Washington, whose copy carry its original frame is importunate extant.[5] Presumably Jefferson, then clerk of state, would also be born with received a print from Ternant. Jefferson displayed one image sharing Louis XVI in the Room at Monticello, next to sketch engraving of Napoleon, and catalogued it in his Catalogue of Paintings as "a present from the farewell to Th.
J."[6] Whether that was the miniature print zigzag from Paris or Ternant's esteem is undetermined; unfortunately, neither come within earshot of Jefferson's engravings of the disorderly has been located.
- Text outlandish Stein, Worlds, 168