On his return from Austerlitz, Napoleon decreed on 17 March, 1806, that his ministers should be painted by some of the best painters of the era (Gros, Kinson, Prudhon, Lefèvre inter alia) and that these likenesses should hang in the salon adjacent to the Salon des Maréchaux in the Tuileries Palace. Amongst these ‘civilian marshals’ was to stand a painting of Treasury Minister François-Nicolas Mollien (1758–1850).
Mollien owed his solid career not only to his evident qualities but also to the fact that he was the right man at the right time. After a very successful period in finance during the Ancien Régime (he was a favoured officer in the tax and finance offices, the Ferme Générale and Contrôle Général), he narrowly avoided the guillotine to become Napoleon’s ‘go-to man’ during the Consulate on matters related to the stock exchange and banking. Mollien was also close friends with Consular Finance Minister, Martin-Michel Gaudin. When in 1806, Treasury Minister Barbé-Marbois was brutally sacked over the Négociants Réunis scandal, Mollien (by now Conseiller d’Etat and who happened to be present at the meeting), was catapulted into that ministerial office, almost against his own wishes. Regardless, François-Nicolas was to be one of France’s great treasury ministers, with his life in public office stretching through the Hundred Days to the reigns of Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe I. Dying aged 92, Mollien was the last surviving minster of the First Empire and one who saw the arrival of the Prince President in 1848.
Robert Lefèvre (1756–1830), the artist who painted this portrait, received his commission from Vivant Denon in a letter dated 3 June 1806 – both Napoleon and Denon were very appreciative of Lefèvre’s work. The instructions were quite precise. For a fee of 4000 Francs, he was to deliver on 1 November of the same year a painting that was “2 metres 18 ½ centimetres (6 feet, 8 inches, 7 lines) tall by 1 metre, 42 ½ centimetres (4 feet, 4 inches, 6 lines) wide”. As befits a state painting, Mollien is shown in his ministerial uniform wearing the decoration of the Légion d’honneur, caught mid-stride as if on the way to a meeting, perhaps with the Emperor. Nor was it Lefèvre’s only image of the minister. We know from the catalogue to the Salon of 1808 that Lefèvre also worked up a fully-finished preparatory painting of the portrait here, described as “a half-length portrait of His Excellency the Minister of the Treasury”, no. 513. Curiously, there exists today at the Banque de France a half-length portrait of the minister painted by Alexandre Hesse in 1874 that resembles the work here. Did Hesse copy the preparatory painting?
Be that as it may, Lefèvre’s work may never have (or if it did, only briefly) hung in the Tuileries. In May 1808, the canvas was redirected (with the other ministerial paintings decreed in March 1806) to the palace at Compiègne. Today it is held at the Château de Versailles, and in May 2012 it travelled to Melbourne, Australia, as part of the great exhibition, Napoléon: Revolution to Empire, organised by the National Gallery of Victoria in partnership with the Fondation Napoléon.
Peter Hicks, February 2016