The Mysterious Suicide of François Lemoyne

I’m doing the AAH’s Art History in the Pub this month, which means I get another chance to talk about François Lemoyne’s suicide. This has come out of the research I’ve been doing with Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art) on Artists’ Things (website launching soon!) and the material culture of artists in eighteenth-century France. This time I'm focusing a little bit less on the sword itself, and a little bit more on the suicide... and maybe this time, in true CSI:18thC Paris style, the mystery will be solved!

Art History in the Pub is free and open to all. It's at 7:30 on 26th September at The Monarch in Camden. The abstract is below and further details are available on the AAH website.

The Violent Suicide of François Lemoyne

An 18th-Century Art History Mystery

18th-C French Sword - Photo: V&A

Paris, 4 June 1737: the celebrated artist François Lemoyne commits suicide. It started as an ordinary day. Lemoyne had been to his studio to give a lesson to his students and taken a meal with his cousin. But then events took a macabre turn. Lemoyne retired to his bedroom, carefully locked the door, took up his sword, and proceeded to inflict upon his body multiple fatal stab wounds, before dropping to the floor and dying in a pool of blood.

Lemoyne’s death shocked and horrified his family and colleagues, and it has since presented something of a mystery for art historians. Why should this incredibly successful artist – first painter to Louis XV – have wanted to kill himself only months after completing what is now considered his magnum opus: the ceiling of the Apotheosis of Hercules at the Château de Versailles? Was it over money? Professional jealousy? A madness induced by lack of recognition? Could it have been murder? Or if it really was suicide, then how did Lemoyne complete his gruesome task?

With most of the clues now lost deep in the past, some art-historical sleuthing is necessary in order to retrieve the traces. In this paper, I attempt to solve these perplexing mysteries through a forensic and art-historical analysis of the object responsible: Lemoyne’s sword. Using police reports, autopsies, and witness statements, I piece together the final hours of Lemoyne’s life and offer a material reconstruction of the now lost fatal weapon, exploring what Lemoyne’s sword looked like, what he did with it, and what it meant to him. Drawn from a larger study investigating what artists’ personal possessions reveal about their everyday lives, this case explores the limits and possibilities of object-biography, and presents an exercise in recovering the material history of an object when that object no longer materially exists.