Louis François Sébastien Fauvel

Stephen Hawkins;
Purchased in 1936

London, Royal Academy, Landscapes in French Art, 1950, no 432;
London, Royal Academy, The Paul Oppé Collection, 1958, no. 427;
Ottawa, The National Gallery of Canada, Exhibition of Works from the Paul Oppé Collection, 1961, no. 121

Laid down. Overall in good condition. Few light brown stains scattered throughout. Chalk and watercolour fresh and strong.
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Lots 147-154 An important group of Greek views by Louis François Sébastian Fauvel (1753-1838)

 

Living in Athens for most of the time between 1793 and 1822, Louis Sébastien Fauvel is a crucial witness to its last years as an Ottoman city. Born in France in 1753, he trained as a painter in the Académie royale de peinture.  He first visited the Ottoman empire in 1780 in the suite of the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, who was preparing his book, Voyage pittoresque de la Grece.  Fauvel acted as the count’s draughtsman, cartographer and collector of antiquities (or, as Choiseul-Gouffier wrote, pillager).

 

Fauvel returned to Constantinople in 1784, when Choiseul-Gouffier was appointed ambassador there. Travelling with a servant and an interpreter, he recorded among many other sites, Mycenae Argos and Thessaloniki.  In 1793, after Choiseul-Gouffier (who often took the credit for Fauvel’s drawings and discoveries) emigrated to Russia, Fauvel settled in Athens.  Only in the period 1799-1803, when France was at war with the Ottoman Empire, did he leave Athens: first as a prisoner in Constantinople, then in France.  In 1803 he returned as French vice-consul to the city he loved, living initially in the French-protected Capucin convent, then in a house in the Agora.  In addition to his career as a consul and artist, he bought and sold coins and antiquities, and acted as a money-lender.  

 

Enjoying excellent relations with the Ottoman authorities, speaking Italian, modern Greek, Turkish, and English, living with a Turkish girl, Fauvel met most of the foreign vistors to Athens. He competed for antiquities with Lord Elgin (unsuccessfully, as Elgin was richer), but the architect C.R. Cockerell found him ‘most obliging’.

 

Whereas most foreigners were Philhellenes, during the Greek war of independence Fauvel remained, as he wrote, ‘a friend of the Turks’. In July 1822, abandoning most of his antiquities, he left with the last Turkish inhabitants of Athens. He spent his last years - surrounded by his plaster models of ancient Athens but cursing modern Greeks - in the Ottoman city of Smyrna, where he died on 12 March 1838.  

 

Dr. Philip Mansel