The Big Picture- Art Writings by Lorette C. Luzajic

The Unknown Legacy of Leopold Burthe

8/6/2026

Angelique, by Leopald Burthe (France, b. USA) 1852

The Unknown Legacy of Leopold Burthe

It’s a stunning painting. Angelica’s body is breathtaking, with pale, flawless flesh. Her white skin and robes contrast with the shadows and dark waves and the granite boulder to which she is chained, a statement about the soul’s longing for freedom.

Leopold Burthe’s painting, Angelique, is perhaps the most striking depiction of Ludovico Ariosto’s Renaissance literary epic, Orlando Furioso. The dramatic story is about a knight’s undying love for the beautiful Angelica. She is abducted by pirates while travelling by sea, and her captors take her to Ebuda Isle. The locals have long been terrorized by a sea monster, and they believe that sacrificing the young beauty will appease him. The artwork shows Angelica alone, chained to the rocks, awaiting the monster to devour her. In the distance we can barely make out her approaching rescuer, another knight, Ruggerio, riding a hippogriff, half horse, half eagle.

Burthe was a friend and follower of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whose 1819 treatment of the subject is the most famous. Ingres’ painting is also sublime, exquisitely composed in a triangle to reveal the battle between Angelica, the sea monster, and the heroic knight who slays the dragon at the moment of truth.

Burthe puts the spotlight on Angelica and the moment before her fate is realized. He strips away the chaos of the abduction and the islanders’ vicious and desperate attempts to thwart the powerful, destructive forces of nature, and omits the sea monster entirely. We are left alone with the temporality and fragility of beauty.

Burthe’s paintings are usually described as Academicism mixed with Romanticism, but he was a neoclassical painter like his mentor at heart, and his teacher, Eugène Amaury-Duval, who was Ingres’ student, staying true to the meticulous, smooth brushstrokes, defined lines, and mathematically structured composition inherent in the movement, his human figures like classical sculptures. Classical mythology and literature were, unsurprisingly, the most important subjects for neoclassicist painters, with messages about morality and heroism over raw emotion. The quiet serenity in this painting speaks to this influence, where idealized figures showed calm stoicism even in the midst of chaos. Even in Ingres’ work depicting the epic battle, everyone looks remarkably unruffled.

If you’ve never seen this painting or heard of Leopold Burthe, you aren’t alone. There are only eight or nine known existing paintings by this artist, and known references to a series of drawings. Some of these we have never seen images of but know only from references in records.

A French art dealer found this intriguing oil painting in a small shop in southern France. It was well preserved and the signature was clearly legible after a gentle cleaning. Art historians had notations of Angelique and the artist from the Paris salon catalogue from 1852. Researchers confirmed the find.

Leopold Burthe was born in New Orleans in 1823, so the New Orleans Museum of Art acquired it in 2018, making it available to the public to see for the first time since 1852.

The discovery of such a masterpiece is a monumental occasion. Burthe’s talent was exceptional and rare, and the paucity of numbers of surviving works by this artist makes it all the more reason to celebrate. But the artist remains shrouded in mystery as we know almost nothing about him.

This about sums it up: he was born in New Orleans in 1823, into a wealthy family of plantation owners. His father was an officer under Napolean before moving to the south. At three, Leopold was taken to Paris by an older sister, possibly to save him from the yellow fever epidemic. His sister, Marie-Marguerite Burthe, married a cousin, Baron Louis-Frédéric Foucher de Circé. No doubt under these circumstances, Burthe had an aristocratic and cultured education in France. At 17, he began to study with Amaury-Duval. Amaury-Duval was commissioned to paint Marie-Marguerite’s portrait, and sketched a chalk and pencil portrait of her younger brother as a gift. Burthe’s colleague Theodore Chasseriau sketched him in graphite. These are the only images of the artist known to exist.

Burthe began exhibiting in Paris as a young man. He died at the age of 37, the cause of which we have no details.

His first work in the salons was Bathsheba, 1844, according to the records, but the painting has been lost or otherwise disappeared from public view.

Let us revisit this after reviewing the rest of Burthe’s known catalogue.

Hercules and Omphale, 1845, is also listed by Google and the museum record as no public image known. However, some sites, like Mythologie, show a painting attributed to Burthe that may be credible copies. (https://www.mythologie.fr/Omphale%20et%20Heracles.htm) Feeding this image back into Google, it confirms that it is Burthe’s. Is this information correct?

Arethusa and Alpheus from 1847 depicts a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses, where the nymph Arethusa flees the river god Alpheus.

Girl at the Fountain, 1849, is another painting attributed to Burthe that does not make the formal list of known artworks. It shows as belonging to the Musee St. Croix in France but I am not able to find it on their website.

Sappho Playing the Lyre follows in 1849, showing Sappho with his trademark meticulous form and brushwork. This painting was purchased by the French state.

Next is Ophelie, interpreting Shakespeare’s heroine, in 1851.

St. Sebastian, 1852?, foregoes the usual dramatic gore that usually fuels this saint’s representations. In Burthe’s version, Sebastian is serene and calm.

Diana and Silvandre, 1852, depicts a scene from the novel L’Astree, by Honoré d'Urfé. The painting is dedicated to Sylvain Marie, a friend of Amaury-Duval. In contrast to Burthe’s other paintings, this work feels rough and lacks the detail and smooth finish we expect from the artist. It is signed and dedicated, so the painter must have been ready to present it. Artists often gave works they considered sketches to friends as gifts. Neoclassical works relied on delicate layers of glaze to achieve their smoothness and depth. Still, it is possible, even likely, the work was unfinished. Most of the painting lacks detail. The column in the background is just an impression, and the figures are soft outlines. Silvandre’s face and hands are nearly blank. Compare the drapery of the characters’ gowns and their bodies to Sappho or Angelique, the latter painted the same year, with crisp perfectionism.

We will never know. Because that’s all we have.

Narcissus is the last painting that experts have references for from old records. No known images have been made public. Whether this work exists in a private collection or is lost we do not know.

Burthe referred to a series of drawings on Daphnis and Chloe, but he refused to publish them, because he was a perfectionist and considered them subpar. They were published posthumously but the records are not readily available to the public.

Going back to Bathsheba, the subject of Burthe’s first salon exhibit, I reiterate that experts consider this painting and all images representing it to be lost. In light of this, it is interesting that several hours of research on the artist yielded a curious, low resolution black and white image on Art Price, an auction aggregator. It attributes the image to Burthe. The style certainly fits the artist’s work. I ran the piece through Google Image Search, and it pulled up a single colour image to match. It attributed the work as Echo, by Alexandre Cabanel, a well-known French Academic painter, listing the painting as belonging to the collection of The Met. But The Met’s listing for Cabanel’s Echo is a completely different painting. The image traces only to one site, Mutual Art, but it is no longer listed on the page when following the link.

Is it possible that these images are Burthe’s Bathsheba? Auction sites may have left “ghosts” of the images behind that have ultimately disappeared and no longer connect to concrete information. I am certainly not an expert on French Neoclassicism or Academicism, nor do I possess expert verification skills and training for such mysteries. However, this rendering of Bathsheba does not look like an AI colouring: it does not have that “perfect,” artificial sheen to it. What if this image is from an old auction house and it has come undone from its original tracking? Do we have an image of Burthe’s Bathsheba after all?

With so few images remaining, and next to nothing known in terms of the painter’s biography, the recovery of Angeliquefrom oblivion is an extraordinary contribution to culture. Even with so little to go on, it seems obvious that Burthe’s talent should be considered an essential one in the canon of western art history. Perhaps there is hope from this discovery that other lost or unknown Leopold Burthe treasures will turn up unexpectedly, too.

Lorette C. Luzajic