Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley

In this painting, Girodet evokes the tensions of the period. Belley, standing, wears the uniform of a Convention member, with a tropical landscape behind him, and has a stylish relaxed pose, as favoured in many French political portraits of Revolutionary politicians. His elbow rests on a bust of the philosopher Guillaume Thomas François Raynal (1713–1796), author of A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (1770).^[5] Raynal, who had just died, had been a supporter of the abolition of slavery.^[6]

Scholars have noted that the painting foregrounds Belley's body, particularly the groin area, in ways that reinforce an 18th-century French racial stereotype associating Black men with sexual excess.^{[7]: 65–66} According to art historian Darcy Grigsby, Belley was "an object of Girodet's desire and fantasy".^[8] She notes that in the painting, "the large penis is fantasmically touched by the hand whose spread fingers conjure its width and thereby permit the imagining of Belley's remarkable virility".^[9] Grigsby further argues that the sexualization is inseparable from the portrait's political project: Girodet's painting "accrues not only liberty and individual autonomy (...) but also the erotic charge generally withheld in abolitionist prints", which typically depicted Black men as "asexual or infantilized".^[10]

It was exhibited at the Salon of 1798 at the Louvre in Paris.^[11] On display in Toulon for several decades, it was acquired for the Louvre in 1828 for 3,000 Francs when it was believed to be a portrait of Toussaint Louverture. Today it is in the collection of the Palace of Versailles.^[12][13]

A drawing by Girodet for the portrait in ink and black chalk is in the Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds from the Joseph and Helen Regenstein Foundation in 1973.^[14]