Monsieur Tortoni

baron François Pascal Simon Gérard · c. 1820

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

92 × 72.8 cm (38 × 28 3/4 in.); Framed: 114.3 × 95.3 × 12.4 cm (45 × 37 1/2 × 4 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Before writing this, I need to flag an attribution issue. "Monsieur Tortoni" is a well-documented painting, but it's attributed to **Édouard Manet** (c. 1878–1880), not Baron François Pascal Simon Gérard — and it's held at the **Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum** in Boston, not the Art Institute of Chicago. It's also one of the most famous stolen artworks in history, taken in the 1990 Gardner heist and never recovered. François Gérard was a real and significant painter — a leading Neoclassical portraitist, favourite of Napoleon's court — but I can't find any widely-documented work of his called "Monsieur Tortoni." A few possibilities: 1. **The painting is Manet's** — and the artist/institution fields need correcting. 2. **It's a different Gérard work** with a different title — and "Monsieur Tortoni" is a naming error. 3. **It's a lesser-known Gérard work** I can't verify — in which case I shouldn't write facts about it without a reliable source, per your own brief's instruction against fabrication. If you can confirm the correct details — or let me know you want the Manet version — I'll write the description immediately. I'd rather pause 30 seconds than put wrong attribution on a product page.