French painter who studied under Vien. He won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1772 with The Children of Niobe Killed by Apollo and Diana (Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts). Lemonnier became an Academician in 1789 and exhibited historical and mythological subjects at the Salon from 1785-1814. He was administrator of the Gobelins Factory between 1810 and 1816.
The scene represents an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Apollo and Diana destroy the children of the arrogant and presumptuous Niobe with a rain of arrows, because she had declared herself superior to Leto, their own mother.
With this painting Lemonnier won the competition for the Prix de Rome in 1772 against Jacques-Louis David, who became bitterly disappointed and made a half-hearted attempt at suicide by starvation.
Many of the important personages of the period assembled in the salon of Madame Geoffrin around a bust of Voltaire.
The salons, places of conversations in sophisticated social circles in Paris and the provinces, played an important role in 18th-century cultural life. Artistic undertakings, problems of decoration, and literary endeavours all became topics in the salons. It is interesting to note that the term designating social gatherings was also applied to the dominant mode of artistic exhibition, the famous Salons of painting.
In that age of intense social life, Parisian caf�s played a role almost as remarkable as that of the glittering literary salons hosted on fixed days of the week by women such as Madame du Deffand and Madame Geoffrin, which characterized the Enlightenment.
This is an autograph replica of reduced scale of the original in the Château du Malmaison, Rueil. The event depicted is a reading of Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine (a tragedy about Ghengis Khan and his sons) that was first produced in 1755.
