Biography

French painter and collector. He entered the École de Dessin in Lyon around 1791 as a pupil of Alexis Grognard (1752-1840). He then became a designer in a wallpaper factory. In 1795 he began working in Jacques-Louis David's studio, where, with Fleury Richard, Comte Auguste de Forbin (1779-1841), François-Marius Granet and Louis Ducis (1775-1847), he belonged to what David's pupils called the 'parti aristocratique'. In 1800 he published with Forbin, who remained a friend, a comedy that was performed at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, Sterne à Paris, ou le voyageur sentimental.

In 1802, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of the Place Bellecoeur in Lyon by the First Consul, Révoil executed a large and elaborately allegorical drawing, Bonaparte Rebuilding the Town of Lyon (preparatory drawings, Paris, Louvre, and Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts), which was the basis for a painting exhibited in the Salon of 1804 (destroyed by the artist, 1816). During the same period he composed a number of religious paintings, for example In Honour of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Christ on the Cross (both Lyon, St Nizier). In 1807 Révoil was appointed a teacher in the recently founded École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. His teaching was marked by considerable erudition and contributed to the birth of the 'Lyon school', which came to the fore in the 1820s.