Franz Roubaud
1856–1928 · Panorama painter of French origin, active in Russia and Germany
Franz Roubaud (Odessa, 1856 – Munich, 1928) was a painter of French origin, trained in Russia, who specialised in circular panoramas. These works were viewed from inside a rotunda, where the spectator stood at the centre of the scene and looked around it. His importance lies in the fact that some of the largest panoramic paintings known were made by him, and they were believed to reproduce events with great fidelity.
Born in Odessa into a Catholic family of French descent, he first studied at the Odessa Drawing School. In 1877 he went to Munich and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. He later settled in Saint Petersburg, where he worked at the Imperial Academy of Arts and painted huge panoramas of historical battles. From 1904 to 1912 he taught as a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, and among his students was Mikhail Avilov.
His best-known works include the Sevastopol Panorama, on which he worked for almost three years from 1901, and the Battle of Borodino Panorama, unveiled in 1911. To prepare the first, he travelled to Sevastopol, consulted documents about the war and spoke with survivors. His legacy lies in preserving a genre that was hugely popular in the nineteenth century and of which very few examples survive, among them the Borodino panorama, now in Moscow.
Works (3)
Franz Roubaud painted this large canvas in 1897, and its subject is the Russo-Persian War. Executed in oil, its considerable scale gives it a commanding presence. It is now held by the Borodinskaya Panorama Museum, an institution devoted to military history. As a pictorial record of that conflict, it shows how late nineteenth-century painting portrayed the Russian Empire's military campaigns.
Large oil on canvas dated 1888 and attributed to Franz Roubaud. Its title is the only clue to its subject available here, and the work is held by the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts. Without further documentation, its theme, commission and meaning cannot be established with confidence, so the painting is best approached through close looking at its scale and detail.
Where to see the work
- Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts Makhachkala · 1
Teachers and pupils
Pupils
- Mikhail Avilov 1882–1954
Curiosities
Research on the ground
Before painting the Sevastopol Panorama, Roubaud travelled to the city, read about the battle and consulted documents describing specific episodes of the war. He also talked with some participants who were still alive. He began his sketches in Saint Petersburg and continued the work in Munich, where he chose a canvas 14 metres high and 115 metres long. The painting was shown in Sevastopol in the summer of 1904, on the fiftieth anniversary of the defence of the city.
An unexpected nationality
Although he was born in Odessa to a French father, Roubaud spent much of his career in Russia. When the First World War broke out, the German authorities recognised him as a French citizen but did not intern him. On 19 December 1914 they granted him German citizenship. He had lived in Munich since 1913 and died there in 1928.