BELLE, Clément-Louis-Marie-Anne

French painter, part of a family of painters, son of Alexis-Simon Belle. He trained with the history painter François Lemoyne and visited Rome. From 1755 he worked for the Gobelins, painting tapestry cartoons adapted from pictures by his contemporaries and from his own designs. In 1759 his altarpiece The Atonement (Paris, St Merri), a work that demonstrates Belle’s gifts as a colourist, achieved great success at the Salon. Two years later he was received (reçu) as a history painter by the Académie Royale.

Among his surviving works for the Gobelins is a cartoon of Leda and the Swan (1778; Paris, Louvre) in the manner of François Boucher, designed to add a new subject to the famous tapestry series The Loves of the Gods. In 1788 Belle was commissioned by Louis XVI’s Directeur des Bâtiments, the Comte d’Angiviller, to design cartoons in triptych format for tapestries to decorate the Palais de Justice, Paris. He was later called on to transform them into Republican allegories by the Revolutionary authorities. The resulting monumental canvases, Allegory of the Republic and Allegory of the Revolution (both 1788-94; Paris, Louvre), display the classicizing yet dynamic characteristics that Belle could achieve in his compositions. In 1790, shortly before its dissolution, he became Rector of the Académie Royale.