In an effort to provide additional information on the Museum's collection to researchers, teachers and students, links to electronic files describing specific artworks can be found below. More will be added in the future as they are developed or requested:

The Last Roll Call of the Victims of the Terror, 1850
Charles-Louis Muller. French, 1815-1892
oil on canvas
51.75 x 95 inches
Gift of Mrs. Thomas Cusack
1960.42
Located in the second floor 18th and 19th Century Gallery

The first version of this painting, exhibited in December 1850 at the Paris Salon, depicts a heart-wrenching scene of prisoners in the Conciergerie jail during the last three days of the Reign of Terror in 1794. The Terror, the most infamous period of the French Revolution, lasted for one year, and was led by Maximilien Robespierre, an ambitious and ruthless Jacobin. As a member of the Committee of Public Safety, he sought to eliminate internal counter-revolution by instigating a policy of fear in which suspects were imprisoned and executed with little or no legal recourse.

Muller presents a great, shadowy hall in which the prisoners wait to hear their names called before going out through the central doorway to be loaded onto carts for their journey to the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution. The painter depicts a sharp contrast between the varied reactions of prisoners who listen for their death sentence, and the stony-faced revolutionaries, the bailiff and the guards, who point out individuals, or conduct them towards the tumbrel waiting in the sunlit courtyard in the background. The tricolor flag is barely discernable in the gloom as it hangs, dirty and torn, above this scene of cruelty and desolation, reminding the viewer of the failure of the revolutionary motto: liberty, equality, fraternity.

Although Muller has imagined this scene in the Conciergerie, the jail in which prisoners were gathered the day before their execution, he consulted the Moniteur Universel, the list of victims published in 1794, in order to be historically accurate in assembling the group of figures he has portrayed. Muller's own pro-monarchist point of view is clearly evident in this painting in the ways he has interpreted the scene. He contrasts the pathetic gestures of well-dressed and beautiful women prisoners with the stern and unbending demeanor of the bailiff, who reads the roll call. The inclusion of the baby, held by the woman on the right side of the painting causes the viewer to wonder if the revolutionaries were inhuman enough to execute innocent children. In fact they were not. Babies were not kept in the prisons, and women who could prove they were pregnant were not executed until after delivery. Another example of Muller's "poetic license" is his bringing to-gether of men and women, which was not allowed in revolutionary prisons.

In the central figure, who gazes out of this scene of suffering towards the viewer and the future, Muller has presented us with a portrait of the poet André Chénier, a victim of the Terror, who is portrayed here as a nineteenth century romantic, secular martyr. In the revolutionary period J-L. David introduced the type of the political martyr with his portraits of Marat, Bara and Le Pelletier, figures who died so that the revolution might live. Nineteenth century painters reused this rich tradition and created a new type of romantic hero, the artist/poet or the political/nationalist leader. Like the defeated heroes who came before them, nineteenth century secular martyrs also expressed the rightness of their cause by sacrificing their lives.

André Chénier, a neoclassical poet and journalist, was not well-known during his lifetime. Although he was sympathetic to Louis XVI, believed in constitutional monarchy, and detested the Terror, he may have been executed because his name was confused with that of one of his brothers. Muller has depicted Chénier in the act of composing his last poem, which he is known to have written on thin strips of brown paper torn from the wrapping used for bundles of laundry. His work was not widely known in France until it was published in 1819, but from then until the end of the century Chénier's short life and death inspired several plays, Alfred de Vigny's novel Stello (1832), poems addressed to him by Victor Hugo and Alexander Pushkin, and Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier, which was first performed in 1896. It is likely that one of the reasons for the enthusiastic reception of Muller's painting depended on the popularity of Stello, in which the protagonist, Dr. Noir, visits Chénier in jail. One whole chapter, The Straw-bottomed Chair, is devoted to a meditation on such a chair, on the names and initials carved into its wood, on the people who had sat in it and how they had passed on. The overturned straw-bottomed chair in the foreground of Muller's painting may have been intended as a trigger image to jog the viewer into remembering Chénier via this passage in the novel.

The Last Roll Call was an immediate success when it was first exhibited in 1850. In 1851 President Louis Napoléon bought it for the French government, and in 1855 it was exhibited again when it won a gold medal. At first the painting hung in the Luxembourg Museum, and then in 1881 it was moved to the National Museum at Versailles. It has recently been cleaned and is now on display at the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille. Nine other versions of the painting exist, including the Snite Museum's, three in France and six in the United States. In 1849 Muller was awarded the Legion of Honor, and he continued to receive official commissions for the Louvre and for Napoléon III throughout his life.

Muller followed the usual path of a successful, official French painter. He entered the School of Fine Arts in 1831, and then studied with Gros, a former student of J-L. David, whose studio Gros had taken over after the master's death in 1825. Muller spent two years on the almost obligatory study in Rome from 1841-1843. This academic training would have included much practice with live models on an exercise called "expressive heads," in which the artist learned to portray a variety of emotions in the expressions of the face. In The Last Roll Call the figures are carefully choreographed and lit to display their varied expressions and gestures Muller can be categorized as an academic painter who achieved his success not by experimenting or challenging the status quo or government officials, in the manner of Courbet, but by producing large, dramatic and anecdotal works. Muller's Catholicism and monarchism colored his interpretations of history, and caused them to be acceptable to his governmental patrons. In The Last Roll Call he combines a rococo focus on beautiful women wearing sparkling silk dresses, and a Greuze-like frieze of gesticulating characters who spread across the painting's middleground, with the dark and threatening gloom in which the poet-hero records his experience as he awaits his sentence. This combination of eighteenth century and nineteenth century style and subject proved to be a winner in 1850.

Written by Diana C.J. Matthias, Curator of Education/Academic Programs, Snite Museum of Art.
References:
Bordes, Philippe. "Découverte: Peinture Charles-Louis Muller." No.2.1.03
Musée de la Revolution Française, Vizille. 1994.

Christiansen, Rupert. Romantic Affinities. Cardinal. London. 1988.

Davenport, Nancy. "Le Dernier Appel des Condamnés." Gazette des Beaux Arts. Dec. 1986.
p. 145-163.

De Vigny, Alfred. Stello. Flamarrion. Paris. 1984.

Scarfe, Francis. André Chénier: His Life and Work. Oxford University Press. 1965.