Children of Edward by Hippolyte Paul Delaroche (1831)

Today we start a weeklong look at the work of Hippolyte Delaroche (1797-1857), also known as Paul Delaroche.  Paul came from an artistic family; his father was an art dealer who made his fortune buying, selling and cataloging art.  His father encouraged young Paul and worked hard to advance his artistic education, sending young Paul to work with Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (1771– 1835) in 1818.

Paul studied landscape painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and he made his first appearance in the Salon with an oversized picture, Josabeth Saving Joas (1822). This picture met with great success and, as a result, he soon became the friend of such luminaries as Géricault and Delacroix.  In fact, the three of them were the center of the historical painting scene of the era.

Following his debut, Paul spent most of his life as an active (and prolific) artist.  He visited Italy in 1838 and 1843, when his father-in-law, Horace Vernet (1789-1863) was director of the French Academy. His studio in Paris was in the rue Mazarine, where he built a reputation for patient industry.

The great love of Paul’s life was Louise Vernet.  They married in 1835, the same year he exhibited Head of an Angel, for which she served as a model.  Paul never recovered fully from the shock of her death 10 years later, aged only 31.  After her loss he created a series of small, exquisite pictures based on the Passion of the Christ, focusing his attention on the story’s dimension of human suffering.

Paul was extremely adept at history paintings – meaning not only pictures depicting historic events, but also mythological or biblical pictures, scenes from great literature and allegorical paintings. 

The key to Paul’s enduring success was that he had a dramatist’s eye and sense for the key moment of heightened tension.  His pictures depicting past events were not, perhaps, always scrupulously accurate in the representation of the actual historical moment, but were always intensely dramatic and psychologically true.

With that in mind, let’s look at one of his great pictures, The Children of Edward (1831).  The scene is, of course, familiar to anyone who has seen Shakespeare’s Richard III.  Two princes, held in the Tower of London, are about to be smothered on the order of Crooked-Back Richard, their uncle and usurper of their rights (and, eventually, the throne of England).  Knowing the fate of the children as we do, the sense of dramatic suspense is remarkable.

The two children, pale with terror, cling to one another on a four-poster bed in a dark room.  Edward V, and his brother Richard, children of the late king, Edward IV, have heard a noise and stopped reading.  The king gazes sadly at us, the gaze of his younger brother is drawn to the door, where his eventual murderer will enter.  The dog sees the shadow of a foot in the light under the door….

When this picture debuted at the Salon in 1831, it was a riotous success.  It was immediately purchased by the administrators of the Royal Museums; indeed, it was the inspiration for Casimir Delavigne to write a play, The Children of Edward (1833), which is little-performed today.

With this picture, Paul renders the subject in a manner both natural and emotional.  The children are quite real, and the dog emphasizes the tragic pathos of the moment.  There are few warm colors in evidence, and Paul’s inherent sense of dramatic romanticism is contained – such a moment did not need embellishment.

The scene can be found in Richard III, Act 4, Scene 3, where it is described in the words of Sir James Tyrell, who had commissioned their murder from Dighton and Forrest:

The tyrannous and bloody act is done -

The most arch deed of piteous massacre

That ever yet this land was guilty of.

'O thus', quoth Dighton, 'lay the gentle babes';

'Thus, thus', quoth Forrest, 'girding one another

Within their alabaster innocent arms.

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,

And in their summer beauty kissed each other.

A book of prayers on their pillow lay,

'Which once', quoth Forrest, 'almost changed my mind.

But O, the devil' -- there the villain stopped,

When Dighton thus told on, 'We smothered

The most replenished sweet work of nature,

That from the prime creation e'er she framed.'

More Delaroche tomorrow.

The Egyptian Expedition Under the Command of Bonaparte, by Léon Cogniet

This wonderful picture, from 1835, can be found on the ceiling at the Louvre.  It was painted by Léon Cogniet (1794 – 1880), a French historical and portrait painter.  Cogniet was born in Paris. In 1812, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin alongside such heady company as Delacroix and Géricault.

Cogniet won the Prix de Rome in 1817 and was a resident at the Villa Medici from then until 1822.  He became famous for the painting Marius Among the Ruins of Carthage (1824), and later decorated several ceilings in the Louvre and the Halle de Godiaque in the Hôtel de Ville, Paris, and a chapel in the church of Madeleine.  At first he painted in classical style, but later adopted the more spirited free-flowing brushwork of the Romanticists.

While looking at this picture, it’s important to remember that Napoleon also created a beachhead in the Middle East.  The Emperor had decided that France’s navel power was not up to the task of defeating the Royal Navy in the English Channel, and proposed a military expedition to seize Egypt, undermining Britain’s access to its trade interests in India.  Napoleon’s plan was to form an alliance with the Muslim enemy of the British in India, Tipu Sultan.   (Clearly, forging agreements with Third World madmen is not a 20^th Century phenomenon.) 

Napoleon was elected a member of the French Academy of Science in May 1798.  For his Egyptian expedition, he brought with him 167 scientists: mathematicians, naturalists, chemists and geodesists among them; their discoveries included the Rosetta Stone, and their work was published in the Description de l'Égypte in 1809.  This work was a treasure trove for aesthetes, Orientalists and scientists – and is still consulted today for its candor and fresh approach to the region.

Napoleon invaded Malta en route to Egypt in 1798, losing only three men in the process.  The Emperor’s luck held once in Egypt – in the battle of Shubra Khit against the Mamluks (Egypt’s military caste), only 29 French were killed while 2,000 Egyptians were lost.  However, Horatio Nelson and the British fleet captured or destroyed all but two French vessels in the Battle of the Nile, and Bonaparte's goal of a strengthened French position in the Mediterranean was frustrated.

Napoleon moved his army into the Ottoman province of Damascus (Syria and Galilee) in 1799, with 13,000 French soldiers he conquered the coastal towns of Arish, Gaza, Jaffa, and Haifa.  There, he ordered 1,400 prisoners to be executed by bayonet or drowning to save bullets.  The massacre would last three days.  Never a sentimentalist, when his own men were stricken with bubonic plague, Napoleon ordered them to be poisoned as they returned to Egypt. 

Napoleon had to abandon his dreams of Eastern conquest to return to Europe in 1801 to ward off further defeats for the French Army.  Not taking into account the extraordinary loss of life and cavalier attitude towards human suffering, Napoleon’s expedition was a scientific and artistic bonanza.  French Orientalist painting was transformed by this ultimately unsuccessful invasion of Egypt and Syria, which stimulated great public interest in Egyptology.

This wonderfully complex picture is almost allegorical in its attempt to comprise the Egyptian adventure.  The Emperor, of course, is upon a platform, the canopy overhead both protecting him from the sun and preventing him from overwhelming the picture.  On one hand, an officer, his back to us, reports on worldly affairs while an artist, on the other hand, sketches the mammoth statues in the distance.  (Look to the extreme right of the frame.)

Extreme left of the frame, a scholar pore over his notes while, before him, antiquarians collect and catalog treasures.  In the center foreground, a soldier gazes rapturously at a sarcophagus carried by two workmen (one, clearly disgusted).  Beside the soldier looking on, a white-clad Egyptian takes in the scene with a look of disdain.

The most interesting figure is to the far right of the frame talking to the chained slave: Jean-François Champollion (1790 – 1832).  Cogniet would do a larger, more formal portrait of Champollion, but here he shows the scholar holding the Rosetta Stone, from which he would decipher the hieroglyphs of the Ancient Egyptians.

More Cogniet tomorrow!

Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard Part IV: Don Juan and the Statue of the Commander

I had thought of ending the week with another example of the Neoclassicism of Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (1780-1850), but when I came upon this, I could not resist.

My readers are doubtless familiar with the story of Don Juan, the well-known libertine.  There are countless versions of the story, from Moliere and Corneille to Mozart and Byron.  The painter Eugene Delacroix (1798 – 1863) was particularly taken with Mozart’s opera, writing “What a masterpiece of romanticism!  And that in 1785!  … the entry of the specter will always strike a man of imagination.”

Delacroix was writing of the finale, where the ghost of one of the Don’s victims comes to escort the libertine to hell.  This picture looks so unlike most of Alexandre-Évariste’s oeuvre that I cannot but help but think it had some special significance for the artist.  It’s a little picture, no more than 16x13, and hardly on the scale of his deliberately executed Neoclassical masterpieces.  The brush strokes are clearly visible, and it is painted with a loose vitality that has more in common with the Impressionism that was still decades away than the Neoclassical ideal it would eventually shun.

Don Juan here is clearly heroic: with his athletic stance, burning torch and pointed beard and mustaches, he looks more like a figure from a swashbuckling novel than a dissipated roué.  His torch illuminates two ghostly female figures … other victims, or fellow neighbors in hell?  In most of the artist’s pictures, the figure of the Commander would be depicted in finicky detail, each chink and join of armor would be visible, along with showy touches, such as light reflected upon the metal.  Not here – the ghostly figure is suggested by some thickly painted brush strokes, the face no more than a few well-placed shadows. 

That this moment in the Don Juan story held some kind of import for Alexandre-Évariste is evident – he painted it more than once.  Why, I wonder?  It does not take an armchair Freud to see that the Commander is clearly a father figure.  Did Alexandre-Évariste have regrets about the way he treated his father?  Not only did he burn Papa Fragonard’s drawings, but he seems to have sat idly by while the old man was destitute (living by the good graces of another Neoclassicist, David.)  I can’t help but think that this picture is clearly tied to the artist’s psyche.  He paints Don Juan handsome and athletic – certainly the way that most of us see ourselves, despite what our mirrors tell us.  But this heroic figure is still undone by the physical, patriarchal figure of his past sins.  It does not seem to stretch the imagination too much to think that the events may be operatic, but the thoughts are autobiographical. 

If the picture was prophetic – that there is a hell and poor Alexandre-Évariste is indeed roasting marshmallows with other artistic villains like Cellini and Caravaggio – one can hope that he still has access to paint and canvas.  Work like this would merit a trip to the lower regions, if only for a visit.

Prud’hon My Absence: Male Nude Leaning on a Rock

I ask my readers to forgive my several days absence, but your correspondent had heavy business obligations that kept him away.  I had also promised another work by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758--1823), so here is another magnificent academic drawing by the master, Male Nude Leaning on a Rock.

The model for this drawing was named Lena, one of two models used by Prud’hon with the same name.  Were there two Lena brothers, or father and son?  That is not known, and though Goncourt states that Lena was the ‘usual male model’ for Prud’hon, it’s unlikely with his bald pate and rather prominent features that he did much work for the artist.  Indeed, he seems to appear in only two other drawings.

This work is done on blue paper with black and white chalk.  I have not seen the original myself, but it appears that a smaller piece of paper was hitched to a larger one – you can see that the figure’s toe and part of the rock extend beyond a horizontal line near the bottom of the page.

This drawing is little short of magnificent.  Note how Prud’hon uses white chalk to accentuate the straining muscles of the arms, which are used to support the weight of the model.  Note, too, how the figure seems to twist to one side as it leans forward – a natural reaction for anyone in the same pose.  (Try it yourself.)  His genitalia are pushed to the side to accommodate his bent leg, and Prud’hon uses a masterful circular shadow thrown by the arm over the bent leg to create a rounded mass as it juts forward.  He also uses a mix of black and gray to delineate the length of the body as it recedes into the distance, and builds up very dark shadows on the arm and arm pits where the light cannot reach.

Though one might think the foot partially hidden by the rock is overlarge, it is important to remember that artists habitually draw feet too small, and that a normal-sized foot is usually as large as a normal sized head.

The truly magnificent achievement of this drawing is the head – for the head is not level, but both tilted and turned.  Prud’hon manages to capture the shift in perspective caused by the tilt and – perhaps my favorite detail of the drawing – the dark shadow cast by the head over the shoulder does not fully cover the barest section of shoulder blade that manages to capture light.

Most artists of Prud’hon’s heroic age made academic drawings during their initial artistic training, and then abandoned the practice.  They drew, of course, but mainly studies or cartoons as a preliminary step to developing a painting or fresco.  Not so Prud’hon, who continued to produce academic drawings throughout his life.  This made him something of an anomaly – these drawings were often time-consuming to create and had little value to collectors or buyers at the time – indeed, Prud’hon’s magnificent drawings were considered of negligible value once his work was sold at the time of his death.  Now, they are considered his greatest artistic legacy.

But he loved to draw.  There is a story told by Eugene Delacroix, who knew several of Prud’hon’s students, including Auguste-Joseph Carrier.  Delacroix wrote that:

In the last years of his life, Prud’hon could be seen spending all of his evenings in the studio of one of his students, Monsieur Trezel, drawing from the model as if he were a student himself.  He felt very comfortable there, with his pencil case in hand, in the company of these young people.  His kindness toward them was inexhaustible.  Many accomplished artists also had reason to praise him.  He often neglected his own work to help colleagues out with his advice and his able hand.

Tomorrow we will take a look at a Prud’hon painting.