The Stolen Bird

This allegorical genre scene uses the visual structures of history painting reminiscent of the great Jacques-Louis David – dramatic interior light, a narrative diagonal composition and animated figures – to present a moralizing story of The Stolen Bird, a tale of lost purity. Like Jean-Baptiste Greuze and other French artists of the early Neoclassical period, Louis Gauffier, depicted these subjects based in part on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, while living and studying in Rome. This painting compares to the Broken Eggs by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, which similarly uses an allegory to convey the moralizing tale of lost virginity and a mother’s reaction. This domestic scene codes the message with an intellectual conceit on morality, societal expectations and loss of innocence. The saying ‘the cat that got the canary’ – used to indicate a person very proud or satisfied in their actions – is visually depicted here as the mother figure chases a smug cat holding its prey while her daughter cowers below.

Gauffier studied in Paris but after winning the Prix de Rome in 1784, he would primarily remain in Italy for the remainder of his life. During unrest in Rome in 1793, a reaction to the revolution in France, he and his wife fled to Florence, where he painted landscapes and portraits, often for English tourists or, from 1799, French military officers who were then occupying Florence.