RÉVOIL, Pierre

French painter and collector. He entered the École de Dessin in Lyon around 1791 as a pupil of Alexis Grognard (1752-1840). He then became a designer in a wallpaper factory. In 1795 he began working in Jacques-Louis David's studio, where, with Fleury Richard, Comte Auguste de Forbin (1779-1841), François-Marius Granet and Louis Ducis (1775-1847), he belonged to what David's pupils called the 'parti aristocratique'. In 1800 he published with Forbin, who remained a friend, a comedy that was performed at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, Sterne à Paris, ou le voyageur sentimental.

In 1802, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of the Place Bellecoeur in Lyon by the First Consul, Révoil executed a large and elaborately allegorical drawing, Bonaparte Rebuilding the Town of Lyon (preparatory drawings, Paris, Louvre, and Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts), which was the basis for a painting exhibited in 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. of 1804 (destroyed by the artist, 1816). During the same period he composed a number of religious paintings, for example In Honour of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Christ on the Cross (both Lyon, St Nizier). In 1807 Révoil was appointed a teacher in the recently founded École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. His teaching was marked by considerable erudition and contributed to the birth of the 'Lyon school', which came to the fore in the 1820s.