MÉNAGEOT, François-Guillaume

French painter. He was the son of Augustin Ménageot (d 1784), an art dealer and adviser to Denis Diderot, and he studied with Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays and with François Boucher, whose bravura style and use of light, warm colours he adopted in his early works. He won the Prix de RomeGLOSSARYA scholarship, founded concurrently with the French Academy in Rome (1666), that enabled prize-winning students at the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris to spend a period (usually 4 years) in Rome at the state's expense. Prizes for architecture began to be awarded regularly in 1723, and prizes for engravers and musicians were added in the 19th century. The prizes were meant to perpetuate the academic tradition and during the 18th and 19th centuries winning the award was the traditional stepping stone to the highest honours for painters and sculptors. Many distinguished artists (as well as many nonentities) were Prix de Rome winners, notably David, Fragonard, and Ingres among painters and Clodion, Girardon, and Houdon among sculptors. The prizes are still awarded and the system has been adopted by other countries. in 1766 with Tomyris Plunging the Head of Cyrus into a Bowl of Blood (Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts). From 1769 to 1774 he was at the Académie de France in Rome. Having been approved (agréé) as a history painter by the Académie Royale in Paris in 1777, he exhibited at the SalonGLOSSARYIn the French language of the 18th and 19th centuries it designated an actual exhibition space, as well as the academic art exhibitions staged in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre since 1667. From 1737, the exhibitions took place biennially and, after the French Revolution, annually in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of the 19th century the official Salon jury was dissolved in order to make way for a committee of state-approved artists, i.e. former Salon members, who created the highly influential Société des Artistes Français. the Farewells of Polyxena to Hecuba (Chartres, Musée des Beaux-Arts), a vast already Neoclassical work that was warmly received. His morceau de réception was a powerfully classicizing work entitled Learning Resisting the Passage of Time (1780; Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts). A year later he triumphed at the Salon with the Death of Leonardo da Vinci in the Arms of Francis I (Amboise, Hôtel de Ville).

Ménageot was one of the painters who was involved in the return to the Grand Style: his compositions became more horizontal, the architecture more monumental, the drapery sculptural and the colouring increasingly cold. Works that bear witness to this development include Astyanax Torn from the Arms of Andromache (1783), Cleopatra Paying her Last Respects to Anthony (1785; both Angers, Musée des Beaux-Arts), the Continence of Scipio (1787; Zidlochovice Museum) and Meleager Implored by his Family (1789; Paris, Louvre), the last being one of his most resolutely Neoclassical works.