Les Préparatifs de la guerre ou Les Apprêts de l’Amour

Prudhon pairs Love gentle preparations with War martial readiness in a late-18th-century allegorical pair — Love figure, soft and luminous, set beside the armed figure of War, each readied for its task. Pierre-Paul Prudhon (1758-1823), the great French painter of the turn of the century, held a position between the rococo and the neoclassicism: the sinuous, atmospheric grace of his drawing — a quality that made him the favourite painter of the Napoleonic court, and that earned him the title of the corrègio of France — brought a sensibility of its own to the new classical age. The painting is held in the Musée Cognacq-Jay, le goût du XVIIIe.