Pierre Henri Révoil (Lyon 1776 – Paris 1842) trained with Alexis Grognard and Jean Gonichon at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon before entering the workshop of Jacques-Louis David in 1795. Initially inclined towards allegorical and religious painting in the neo-classicist tradition, he soon developed a special interest in the art and culture of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

With his friends and fellow-artists Fleury Richard, François-Marius Granet and Auguste de Forbin, he explored the old castles and ecclesiastical monuments that had been deserted in the French Revolution, visited Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français, and studied old prints and manuscripts in the former royal library. He was an enthusiast of medieval poetry and linguistics (a passion shared with his friend Jean-Baptiste-Bonaventure Roquefort), and even achieved some success as an author of pseudo-Provençal romances. His collection of medieval antiquities, which would form the core of the Louvre collection after its sale to the museum in 1828, was one of the first of its kind and was already celebrated by specialists like Aubin-Louis Millin during the Napoleonic Empire.  

With works like The ring of Emperor Charles V (1810), A tournament (1812) and Henry IV and his children (c. 1813), Révoil established himself alongside Fleury Richard as a pioneer of what is now generally known as “troubadour painting”. Combining the literary and antiquarian memory of the Middle Ages and early modern period with the moralist sentimentality and meticulous aesthetics associated with genre painting, this new type of painting proved an effective evocation of intimate, anecdotal visions of the past; these gained great popularity during the Restoration. After 1830, such idealized and naïve visions of the Middle Ages became increasingly criticized by defenders of the new “Romantic School” such as Théophile Gautier.

From 1807 to 1817 and again from 1823 to 1830, Révoil taught at the École des Beaux-Arts of Lyon, where future luminaries like Hippolyte Flandrin and Victor Orsel were among his students. Strongly committed to the cause of the Bourbon Restoration, Révoil saw his career prospects evaporate after the Revolution of 1830. He did participate in the Musée de l’Histoire de France at the Palace of Versailles with three works, including Philip II "Augustus" raising the oriflamme on 24 June 1190 (1841) and Pharamond is lifted on the shield by the Franks (1841-1845), but he died in solitude and poverty in Paris in 1842.