Claude-Anne de Rouvroy, marquis de Saint-Simon-Montbléru (1743-1819)
By Vicente Lopez (1772-1850)
ca. 1815-1818
Oil on canvas
Museum Acquisitions Fund purchase, 2018
Claude-Anne de Rouvroy, marquis de Saint-Simon-Montbléru, was among the more than ten thousand French soldiers and sailors who participated in the American Revolutionary War. Born in La Faye in western France, Saint-Simon attended military school and, at the age of eighteen, joined the French army. By 1779 he was a colonel of the Touraine regiment, and that year he set sail for the West Indies and the American war.
Saint-Simon was instrumental in winning the final great battle of the Revolutionary War. In late August 1781, he arrived at Jamestown, Virginia—now a general in command of some 3,500 French soldiers. They joined the much smaller American army under Lafayette and helped keep British general Cornwallis pinned at Yorktown. Generals Washington and Rochambeau arrived with the main French-American army from the north a few weeks later. Saint-Simon commanded the left wing of the allied army at the Siege of Yorktown, barring the roads toward Williamsburg and preventing the British army under Lord Cornwallis from escaping by land. Saint-Simon was wounded but refused to leave the lines until the British army surrendered. Though shot in the leg, he mounted his horse to take part in the surrender ceremonies. Shortly thereafter, he sailed back to the West Indies with the French navy and never returned to the United States.
During the French Revolution, Saint-Simon, a royalist, fled France and settled in Spain. He led a small army loyal to King Louis XVI against the French revolutionary government in the Pyrenees. He was made a general of the Spanish army and later led Spanish troops against Napoleon. Captured by the French in 1808, he was sentenced to death for treason. Napoleon commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, from which he was released when Napoleon fell from power in 1814. Saint-Simon lived in Spain for the rest of his life.
This portrait was painted near the end of his life by Vicente Lopez, one of the most prominent Spanish artists of the early nineteenth century. Saint-Simon wears the elaborate uniform of a Spanish general, with the blue-and-white sash and star of the Order of Charles III, the highest Spanish military honor of the time. He also wears a gold-and-silver medal suspended from a yellow ribbon, presented by King Ferdinand VII to soldiers who suffered imprisonment at the hands of the French. And above them all is the Eagle insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati, the private patriotic organization founded by George Washington and his officers to perpetuate the memory of the American Revolution.