Gabriel Revel : collaborateur champenois de Le Brun à Versailles

• Main Author: Dominique Brême
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles 2006-03-01
• Series: Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/13341

The career of painter Gabriel Revel (1643–1712)—born in Château-Thierry, on the borders of Champagne, and died in Dijon, the capital of Burgundy—is a good example of the centralizing and decentralizing pressures that could impact a provincial artist’s life, sure of his talents, but also of his limitations. Revel took the chance to train with Charles Le Brun in Paris, most likely on the recommendation of Jean de La Fontaine, also from Château-Thierry, becoming one of the devoted collaborators on royal projects between 1670 and 1680. There is a second biographical pause in the late 1680s when Charles Le Brun’s influence on the artistic world of Paris and Versailles gradually faded: Revel was drawn to Dijon because of its economic potential, and may have stopped there when he visited Rome, before moving there permanently in the early 1690s, after the death of his famous teacher and mentor. Revel imported an academic classicist style already somewhat outdated in Paris and Versailles, but very much appreciated by the local elites, who were eager to show they were receptive to the “Great Taste” that developed under the Great King.