Goudin is only documented again in 1780, as an ‘associé-artist, professeur de dessin’ and one of the members of the commission of the Salon of Toulouse. He trained a large number of pupils in his studio, and in 1786 was named a professor at the Académie in Toulouse, where among his pupils was the young Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In later years he continued to teach in Toulouse, first at the Ecole Centrale and later at the Ecole Speciale des Sciences et des Arts, where he remained until his death in 1809. He seems to have been a successful and popular teacher, and some eighty artists who showed in Toulouse in the 1780s listed Goudin as their master in the Salon livrets. In 1823 a brief recollection of the artist was published in the Biographie Toulousaine: ‘Goudin had not been able to travel to Rome; sustained only by his aptitude, fighting against a host of obstacles, he did all he could do. His taste was unsure, but he drew with much correction and energy. His drawings washed in bistre on white or blue paper are sought after by collectors; his paintings have less value...[he] excelled mainly in painting battles and military camp scenes.’2 Although some eighteen paintings and more than fifty drawings by Guillaume Goudin are listed in the livrets of the Salons in Toulouse, just two paintings and around a dozen drawings that have been attributed to the artist are known today. The works he exhibited in Toulouse between 1761 and 1791, most of which are now lost3, included a number of battle scenes and religious subjects, but were predominantly scenes taken from classical history. Many of Goudin’s few extant works were formerly attributed to Gamelin; this is true, for example, of one of the very few paintings that can be confidently attributed to Goudin; a large canvas of The Death of Camilla, Queen of the Volsci that was on the Paris art market in the early 1990s4. The present pair of drawings are very close in both style and technique to a large signed drawing by Guillaume Goudin of The Sacrifice of Polyxena (fig.1) in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours5. Also similar in style, though not drawn with blue washes, is a very large finished drawing of The Continence of Scipio (or Themistocles before Alexander) by Goudin, signed and dated 1789, in the Musée Paul-Dupuy in Toulouse6.
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