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| Bénigne Gagneraux Education of Achilles with Chiron the Centaur 1785 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Bénigne Gagneraux Jupiter as a Satyr approaching the Nymph Calliope 1787 oil on panel Galleria Borghese, Rome |
Gagneraux has his languid nymph assume the pose of an admired and frequently imitated antique sculpture assembled in the early 16th century by restorers from a composite of parts, housed at the Vatican, and known as Sleeping Ariadne, or alternatively as Dying Cleopatra.
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| Bénigne Gagneraux Cupid with Lion 1791 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Bénigne Gagneraux Oedipus commending his Children to the Gods 1784 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
"Bénigne Gagneraux (1756-1795) has always been a well known and much admired figure in Dijon, where he was born and trained, and in Sweden, where there have been sizeable collections of his work since 1784, when King Gustav III visited Gagneraux's studio in Rome and made his first purchase, Oedipus commending his Children to the Gods, in many ways the finest history painting Gagneraux ever produced. During his lifetime Gagneraux was undoubtedly one of the most highly esteemed of all French artists working in Rome in the late eighteenth century. He was praised by a contemporary critic in 1788 as the best colourist in Rome . . . and Goethe, in his Italienische Reise, Vol. III, ranked him with Drouais, Desmarais, Gauffier and Saint-Ours as the artists to whom France owed its great reputation. He was certainly among the cultural élite of Rome in the late 1770s, when Piranesi and Mengs were still alive, when Fuseli and Sergel were still working there, and in the early 1780s, when he kept company with Canova, Batoni, Gavin Hamilton, Goethe and [Jacques-Louis] David. . . . Gagneraux left Rome in February 1793 after the second uprising against the French. His studio had been ransacked, his brother, a démocrate enragé, had already been hounded out of Rome; he had suffered with a high fever and arrived in Florence . . . in a nervous and troubled state. On 18th August 1795 he fell from a window and died two hours later. This was interpreted as suicide, not accident."
– from a review article by Helen Weston in the Burlington Magazine (November, 1983)
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| Bénigne Gagneraux Horse frightened by Snake 1787 oil on canvas Musée Magnin, Dijon |
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| Bénigne Gagneraux Genius of Peace halting the Horses of Mars 1793 oil on canvas Musée d'art et d'histoire de Genève |
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| Jean-Baptiste-Frédéric Desmarais Paris with Golden Apple 1787 oil on canvas National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa |
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| Jean-Germain Drouais Marius at Minturnae 1786 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Jean-Germain Drouais Wounded Roman Soldier 1785 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Louis Gauffier Odysseus discovers Achilles amongst the Daughters of Lycomedes 1791 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Louis Gauffier Pygmalion and Galatea 1797 oil on canvas Manchester Art Gallery |
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| Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours Wedding among the Germanic Tribes 1787 oil on canvas Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich |
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| Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours Reunion of Cupid and Psyche ca. 1789-92 oil on panel Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours Ancient Olympic Games ca. 1786-91 oil on canvas Musée d'art et d'histoire de Genève |
In the background of his Olympic Games, at upper right, Saint-Ours has placed a pastiche of one of the two "Horse Tamer" statue groups, which had survived since antiquity on the Quirinal Hill in Rome.