Jean-François-Pierre Peyron, 'Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi', 1781

After a friend boasted about the jewels she owned, Cornelia Africana, a widowed Roman matron and mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (known as the Gracchi), declared her sons to be her jewels. Cornelia educated the boys after their father’s death and they went on to serve as tribunes (powerful elected officials) in Rome in the late second century BC. Here Cornelia holds the hands of her young sons, in contrast to the pearl necklace and expensive fabrics held by her friend. Like Peyron’s Belisarius receiving Hospitality from a Peasant whose Son looks on, this work is intended as a good example to show the importance of moral over material values.

The subject comes from a series of anecdotes, mainly of Roman history, known as Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium, written in about AD 30 by Valerius Maximus. Peyron may have known the story from the Histoire Romaine by Charles Rollin published in 1752.

The signature and date on the picture suggest that it was a preparatory painting (modello) for the finished work in the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse. That museum also has another, probably earlier, oil sketch for this painting. In that version, the statue in the niche was originally painted further to the left, approximately in the same position as in the finished picture. Peyron moved the statue to the right in our version, but then must have realised that the original position was preferable and returned to it for the final painting. The partial inscription at the base of the statue presumably identifies its subject as Tiberius Sempronious Gracchus, Cornelia’s dead husband. By placing the statue in Cornelia’s view, Peyron must have intended to show how the visible memory of her late husband reinforced her virtuous behaviour. There is no inscription to identify the statue at the extreme right of our painting, and that statue was not included in the final version in Toulouse.

It is not certain whether this painting was intended as a pendant (companion piece) for Belisarius receiving Hospitality from a Peasant whose Son looks on. The paintings were made two years apart, and reveal both major and minor differences. This painting is on canvas whereas Belisarius is on paper; there is underdrawing for the Belisarius but not the Cornelia; and the paint has been applied quite fluidly in the Belisarius but more carefully in the Cornelia. However, the background architecture of the Cornelia echoes that in the Belisarius, suggesting that even if the Belisarius was not conceived with a pendant in mind, the Cornelia may have been made later to hang with it.

The final paintings, now both in Toulouse, were commissioned by the abbé de Bernis, who became Archbishop of Rouen. Both of the National Gallery’s paintings were exhibited at the 1785 Salon. Neither of the Toulouse pictures was ever engraved, nor was either known to have been in Paris during Peyron’s lifetime.