The Mysterious Suicide of François Lemoyne

Abstract

On 4 June 1737, the celebrated painter François Lemoyne committed suicide in one of the most gruesome episodes of eighteenth-century French art history.1 Lemoyne's death is anecdotally familiar to most art historians of the period: at the zenith of his career, supposedly wracked with jealousy and unfulfilled ambition, Lemoyne took his own life by stabbing himself with his sword. The archivist Jules Guiffrey transcribed and published several documents relating to the case in the late nineteenth century, providing the sources for this general summary recounted since in most literature on the artist.2 But beyond the familiar synopsis, the actual details of Lemoyne's death are less well known and on closer inspection not at all straightforward.3 Police records and eyewitness accounts offer a perplexing picture of a death as strange as it was violent – a grisly howdunit locked-door mystery. The case encountered in the archives is not a cold case. Despite the almost unfathomable physical feat that Lemoyne achieved that day in his apartments, no one ever doubted that Lemoyne himself was responsible or raised the question of murder. Thus the intention of this article is not so much to solve an unsolved crime as to resolve a mystery, fleshing out the narrative of Lemoyne's death in a forensically inspired art-historical investigation that tells us more than we might expect about the art world of eighteenth-century Paris.