A bronze bust of king Henri IV after Barthelemy Prieur. Paris by 1820

A fine bronze bust of Henri IV, in heroic nudity, using the same composition as the small bronze portrait of the king as Jupiter, by the sculptor Barthelemy Prieur, from the Malon de Bercy collection, now in the Musée du Louvre (inv. OA 11054).

During the 18th century, the figure of Henri IV became very popular. The good King Henri, praised by Voltaire in the Henriade (1728), was honoured by the physiocrats, and the King of Béarn and his minister Sully became key figures in the great debates of the century. Henri IV then appeared in many plays, as well as on numerous works of art, and during the reign of Louis XVI, four paintings commissioned from François André Vincent by the comte d'Angivillier, directeur general des batiments du roi, were transposed into tapestries at the Gobelins manufactory. This "Histoire d’Henri IV" (1784-1787) helped to revive the image of the ideal sovereign, debonair and close to his people.

In the 19th century, the Restoration relied heavily on this tutelary figure of the Bourbon dynasty, a symbol of national reconciliation and legitimate monarchy. In 1814, a plaster statue of the sovereign was restored to the Pont-Neuf for the ceremonies marking Louis XVIII's entry into Paris, and the king commissioned Lemot to create a bronze sculpture, which was unveiled in 1818. Despite the Revolution and the Empire, the popularity of the good King Henri was still very much alive, as it was established in the 17th and 18th centuries, as the ideal sovereign and the idealised king of propaganda, whose features are known to all, like an image from Epinal.
In this respect, it is interesting to note that our bronze is not yet another image shaped by the legend of Henri IV. This fine portrait “à l’antique”, which some might mistakenly interpret as a Neoclassical representation of the Béarnais, is actually a bust rendering of a small bronze, cast by Barthelemy Prieur at the end of the reign of Henri IV, depicting him completely naked, with the attributes of Jupiter.
This heroic nudity, a symbol of virtue, makes this representation of Henri IV all the more apt to embody the glory of the new regime, restored in 1814.