The Return of Marcus Sextus
Artist	Pierre-Narcisse Guérin
Year	1799
Type	Oil on canvas, history painting
Dimensions	217 cm × 243 cm (85 in × 96 in)
Location	Louvre, Paris

The Return of Marcus Sextus (French: Le Retour de Marcus Sextus) is a 1799 history painting by the French artist Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.^{[1] [2]} It depicts the Roman general Marcus Sextus, who had been banished during the rule of Sulla. After Sulla's full, he returns home to Rome to discover his wife is dead. It was originally intended to feature the figure of Belisarius, but Guérin altered it.^[3]

It appears to have served as an allegory for the situation in the French Republic following the Reign of Terror, with Sulla representing Maximilien Robespierre and Marcus Sextus the French émigrés who were returning to the country under the more moderale rule of the Directorate.^[4] The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1799. Today it is in the collection of the Louvre in Paris, having been acquired in 1830.^[5]

• Crow, Thomas. Emulation: David, Drouais, and Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France. Yale University Press, 2006.
• Fried, Michael. Manet's Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Ives, Colta Feller & Barker, Elizabeth E. Romanticism & the School of Nature. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.

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