The Hermitage's acquisition of Francois Fleury Richard's painting Valentine de Milan pleurant la mort de son époux Louis d'Orléans, assassiné en 1407 par Jean sans Peur, duc de Bourgogne (Valentina of Milan Mourning the Death of her Husband, the Duke of Orleans, slain in 1407 by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy)

The canvas Valentina of Milan was painted on a historical subject and depicts Valentina of Milan mourning her husband, the Duke of Orleans, who was killed by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, in 1407. The work was created by Fleury Richard (1777-1852), a member of the Lyons school and a pupil of Jacques-Louis David. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1802 and enjoyed great success.
Among the contemporaries who expressed a high opinion of the painting, mention should above all be made of David, who noted the artist's skill in conveying the light. Valentina of Milan was perceived by critics as the manifesto of a new movement that later came to be known as Troubadour Style. This term, borrowed from medieval poetry, indicated the main theme in the work of painters of this tendency. They translated, as it were, into the language of painting poems about "la belle dame", while also depicting French knights and troubadour-poets. Besides Fleury Richard, the many other artists belonging to this tendency included Pierre Revoil, Jean-Antoine Laurent and Francois Marius Granet. In the specialist literature their work is viewed as the "historical anecdote" genre and at the same time as a harbinger of Romanticism.
Fleury Richard was tremendously impressed by the tomb of Valentina of Milan when he saw it in the Musee des Monuments Francais in Paris and struck by the inscription engraved upon it: Rien ne m'est plus, / Plus ne m'est rien - "Naught is left me, / I am myself naught." In his painting Fleury Richard reproduced this inscription on the scroll that lies on the table and accords with the heroine's sad state. She mourned her husband for an entire year before dying herself in 1408. The greyhound (whippet) depicted beside the widow also feels for his mistress's loss. Visible in the upper part of the window are stained-glass images of two lilies - the coat-of-arms of the Dukes of Orleans and a blue snake (in French "la guivre d'azur") - the device of the Milanese Visconti family to which Valentina of Milan belonged.
Maurin, the first owner of the painting, commissioned a companion piece from Fleury Richard - Charles VII ecrivant ses adieux a Agnes Sorel (Charles VII Composing his Letter of Farewell to Agnes Sorel; Private collection, Moscow). In 1805 Valentina of Milan was acquired by Empress Josephine. In 1814, the canvas was inherited by Eugene Beauharnais, Duke of Leuchtenberg, Prince of Eichstatt, and then by his son Maximilian, who in 1839 married a daughter of Nicholas I.
In 1839, or perhaps 1853, Valentina of Milan came to Russia together with the collection of the Dukes of Leuchtenberg. The last mention of its presence in Russia comes in the catalogue of the 1904 Retrospective Exhibition of Lyons Artists. The most detailed information about the work is given in Marie-Claude Chaudonneret's book La peinture troubadour (Paris, 1980). She believed the painting to be lost, referring to the opinion of Valentina Nikolayevna Berezina, the former curator of French Nineteenth-Century Painting at the Hermitage, who presumed that many items from the Leuchtenberg collection had been sold to foreign collections even before the 1917 revolution. As has now emerged, far from all the Leuchtenberg paintings that were reckoned lost did go abroad. In particular, two works by Fleury Richard - Valentina of Milan and Charles VII Composing Verses to Agnes Sorel (the latter was offered to the Hermitage for purchase in 1997) are still in Russia.
In 1998 Valentina of Milan was temporarily in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, and in 1999 it was offered to the Hermitage for purchase. An expert appraisal carried out in the Hermitage confirmed the authenticity of Fleury Richard's painting. Inscriptions and labels on the back confirm that the canvas came from the collection of the Dukes of Leuchtenberg.
The attribution is by Alexander Alexeyevich Babin, Candidate of Art History, a senior researcher at the State Hermitage.
For the Hermitage Valentina of Milan is of special interest since Fleury Richard was hitherto unrepresented in the museum collection, while the painting itself is connected with the history of the Hermitage and the Beauharnais collection from which many items in the museum come. The celebrated Malmaison service that is now in the Hermitage includes a plate featuring a depiction of this painting.

Valentina of Milan Mourning the Death of her Husband, the Duke of Orleans, slain in 1407 by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy
Francois Fleury Richard