Cromwell Before the Coffin of Charles I, By Paul Delaroche (1831)

We close this weeklong look at the pictures of Paul Delaroche with a scene that happened (at last!) after an execution.  Here is Oliver Cromwell gazing at the body of his nemesis, Charles I.

As we remember from yesterday’s picture, Strafford Led to Execution, we know that Charles was a hard-headed practitioner of real politik, who did not hesitate to cast longtime friends to the wolves in the name of political expediency.  Charles fought the armies of the English and Scottish parliaments in the English Civil War. He was defeated in 1645, and surrendered to a Scottish force that handed him over to the English Parliament.  Charles refused to accede to demands for a constitutional monarchy, and escaped in 1647.  He was re-imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, where he forged an alliance with Scotland.  However, Oliver Cromwell had control over England by 1648, and then Charles was tried, convicted and executed for high treason in 1649.  The monarchy was abolished and the Commonwealth of England began (lasting a scant year, when the monarchy was restored to Charles’ son, Charles II). 

It’s important to remember that Delaroche was among the most popular and highest paid painters of his generation.  It was a generation that brooded upon the French Revolution decades earlier, and had lost much of its optimism.  Instead, Delaroche had a particular affinity for history’s victims.  One critic claimed he specifically chose subjects “that attack the nervous system of the public.”

Delaroche regularly synthesized French history through the prism of English history; and after the defeat of Waterloo there was a great interest in English history in France, and in the works of Walter Scott, Shakespeare and Byron.  Delaroche was drawn to the Civil War, which he saw as a forerunner of the French Revolution, where he cast Charles as a proto-Louis XVI and Cromwell as a less-dapper Napoleon.

Delaroche paints Cromwell Before the Coffin of Charles I with the Lord Protector—“brutal as fact” in the words of the poet Heinrich Heine—standing over the body of his defeated enemy. Though Delaroche would deny any specific connection, it is impossible not to interpret this work as a comment on recent French history.

Delaroche does not trust this man; preparatory drawing of Cromwell

Ever theatrical, Delaroche paints a tableaux.  We witness the horrible crimes of history, and watch the victors and victims saddled with their aftermath.  For greater verisimilitude, Delaroche built little stage sets, including plaster model figures, to help his artistic imagination.  More important, he never let actual history get in the way of a good story – in fact, the scene depicted above is apocryphal.  There is no record of Cromwell gazing at the corpse of his vanquished enemy, but Delaroche had heard the story and knew it contained all the artistic truth his history needed.

The important thing is that Delaroche always gets the big picture right: pity the suffering, despise the powerful and corrupt, and be deeply suspicious of the mob. 

The Cromwell of today’s picture does not seem to be the hero of English parliamentary law, but, rather, yet another politician ensuring that a powerful enemy was out of the way.  One hand rests by the hilt of his sword, the other holds open the coffin.  The tiled floor suggests, to me, a chessboard, and Cromwell has certainly outmaneuvered the King.  There is deep satisfaction on his face, but what does he look at so intently?

Look closely at the corpse of the dead monarch, and you will see the bloody stiches around the dead man’s neck, where the king’s head had been sewn back on the corpse.  Nor is the dead man attired in kingly robes befitting his office, but a simple shroud of white, no different from that wrapping any dead commoner.  He does not lie in state, but his simple coffin is propped on a chair.

I do not think Delaroche believed Charles to be a good man (or monarch); in fact, his sympathetic painting of Thomas Wentworth before execution, a mean and deadly trick Charles played on a key ally, makes that fairly plain.  But, neither, does Cromwell seem to capture the painter’s admiration.

In fact, after painting so many history pictures with executions, betrayals and excess of power, I believe Paul Delaroche knew politicians for what they are.

Strafford Led to Execution by Paul Delaroche (1836)

After yesterday’s splendid (and harrowing) picture of the Execution of Lady Jane Grey, it dawned on me that political executions were something of a specialty of 19^th Century French Academic Painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1857).  Here is yet another stunning example of his dramatic sense of history painting, and his sure hand in finding the telling, poignant psychological moment.

Strafford Led to Execution is not only an interesting picture, but it is also an important lesson to remember when anyone is naive enough to believe the cant of our political leaders (on the Left or the Right). 

Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (1593–1641) was an English statesman and a major figure in the period leading up to the English Civil War. As we will see tomorrow, this was a period of particular interest to Delaroche, primarily because, I believe, he was able to look at French political history through the safe prism of English history.  Wentworth sat in Parliament and was a supporter of King Charles I, acting as Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1632–39. He became a leading advisor to Charles when he was recalled to England, strengthening the royal position against an increasingly powerful Parliament. When Parliament condemned him to death, Charles signed the death warrant and Wentworth was executed.

Wentworth was an advocate of the right of the Commons, as against those of the King, but after Parliament pushed through the Petition of Right in 1628 (and following the assassination of Wentworth’s pro-monarchist rival George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham), Wentworth had a change of heart of changed camps to the side of monarchy.  He proclaimed The authority of a king is the keystone which closeth up the arch of order and government.  Words, I’m sure, he would have loved to have later eaten.

Wentworth now worked to ensure the powers of monarchy; and, in the process, rose up the political ladder himself.  Now, when enmity arose between king and commons, Wentworth advocated the most extreme and violent measures to compel the compliance of errant Englishmen.

These actions did not endear Wentworth to Parliament.  By 1640, he had become the personification of Charles’ very rule.  When Charles was obligated to later summon Parliament once more, the first order of business was to impeach Wentworth.  However, years as courtier prepared him for all kinds of political maneuvering, and Wentworth repelled the charges and was acquitted.  Proving that the more things change the more they stay the same, Parliament decided to pass a bill of attainder, which condemned Wentworth to death, anyway.

Charles had guaranteed Wentworth’s safe passage during his most recent summons to London; in addition, the writ of execution could not be enforced without Charles’ signature, anyway.  But popular hatred for Wentworth threatened to escalate into full-scale revolt, and Charles had to do something.

In a grand gesture, Wentworth wrote to Charles, releasing him from any previous promise.

Sire, out of much sadness, I am come to a resolution of that which I take to be the best becoming me; and that is, to look upon the prosperity of your sacred person and the commonwealth as infinitely to be preferred before any man’s private interest. And therefore, in few words, as I have placed myself wholly upon the honour and justice of my peers, I do most humbly beseech you, for the preventing of such mischiefs as may happen by your refusal to pass this bill, by this means to remove this unfortunate thing forth of the way towards that blessed agreement, which God, I trust, shall for ever establish betwixt you and your subjects. Sire, my consent herein shall acquit you more to God than all the world can do beside. To a willing man there is no injury done; and as, by God’s grace, I forgive all the world with a calmness and meekness of infinite contentment to my disloding soul, so, Sire, I can give the life of this world with all cheerfulness imaginable, in the just acknowledgment of your exceeding favours; and only beg that, in your goodness, you would vouchsafe to cast your gracious regard upon my poor son and his three sisters, less or more, and no otherwise, than their unfortunate father shall appear more or less guilty of this death.

Imagine, then, Wentworth’s surprise when Charles…. Accepted.  Never imagining desertion from the monarch he had served so faithfully and too well, Wentworth quoted scripture, Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.  Political expedience and high human sacrifice are a never-changing constant in real politik.

Charles requested of Parliament that Wentworth have a week to prepare himself; Parliament instead scheduled the execution for the very next day.  He was beheaded on Tower Hill; supposedly the crowd watching the bloody scene was 200,000 strong.  (An over-estimation, surely, as that was nearly the entire population of London at the time.)

Charles would later hear his own death sentence, and one wonders if thoughts of his loyal servant came to mind.

Prior to leaving for execution, Wentworth received the blessing of Archbishop Laud, also imprisoned in the Tower by Charles I, and later executed in January 1645.  Like Wentworth, Laud was arrested, imprisoned and executed as a pawn in the struggle between King and Parliament.

Delaroche’s interest in martyred English royals mirrors post-revolutionary French artists’ fascination with English literature and history, just years after their own regicide.  If this picture lacks the strong, emotional impact of the pictures of Lady Jane Grey and the Children of Edward, that may be because Wentworth was no innocent victim.  However, it does depict grace under pressure as the courtier bows before the barred window of his fellow political prisoner to receive his blessing.

The figures are, once again, kept to a minimum: five principals and the arms of Laud, gesticulating through the bars.  The jailer in his red doublet rests unconcernedly on is sword, while the soldier on the far right looks up at Laud with a blandly disinterested air.  The judge, holding the order of execution, looks at Wentworth solemnly, but there is no pity or compassion; he is simply posing as he fulfills his orders.

The only emotion is that of Wentworth, which is profound resignation and disappointment; his son, who weeps, literally, on the arm of the law; and, interestingly, in the graceful gestures of condemned archbishop.  Delaroche’s message is clear: the wheels of government crush its people without concern or regret, its criminal acts implemented by disinterested bureaucrats.

More Delaroche tomorrow.

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche (1834)

Gad, I love this picture; behold the wonders of 19^th Century Academic Art in all its glory.  Be warned, though: the current art establishment believes The Execution of Lady Jane Grey to be little better than kitsch, and admiration for Delaroche’s technical virtuosity, theatrical sense and incomparable draftsmanship a sign of antiqued and louche taste. 

Paul Delaroche’s (1797-1857) remarkable drawing and sense of composition, the picture’s almost licked finish, and its sense of history tinged with Romanticism is everything that Modernism has rejected.  Delaroche, in fact, was too brilliant too late.  The very earliest proponents of Modernism began to disdain his achievement – Van Gogh called Delaroche one of the “very bad history painters” and affected to hate his work.  If we make a riposte to Van Gough through the mists of time, we must make sure to address his good ear…

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey was bequeathed to the Tate Gallery in the early 20^th Century, and had been banished to storage by 1928.  In 1974, the picture was resurrected for show at the National Gallery.  And there, something quite remarkable happened.  The public, neither interested in, nor gulled by, mainstream art historians discovered the picture and lined up to see it.  Delaroche’s work has proven so popular that the wooden floor before it must be polished far more often than other spots in the gallery.

And no wonder.  Look at everything that Delaroche does in this picture.  There are only five life-size figures, and they are superbly and dramatically placed within the frame.   Lady Jane Grey was the great-grand-daughter of Henry VII, and, at 17, she was named successor to the throne of England by her cousin, Edward VI.  The plan, at least, was that the crowning of Protestant Jane would shore up Protestantism and keep Catholic influence at bay.  However, her claim on the crown was too weak, and she reigned for a scant nine days, after which she was deposed and executed for treason by the rightful monarch, Edward’s half-sister, Mary Tudor.  Delaroche sets his scene in the Tower of London on the morning of the execution, February 12, 1554. 

The girl (little more than a child) is behaving with magnificent poise, which makes the emotional scene more poignant.  She is on the scaffold and dressed only her undergarments.  Her clothes are piled beside her lady-in-waiting, who has collapsed in grief against the left wall.  Her other handmaiden faces the wall, the horror to come too much to bear. 

Grey, blindfolded, reaches out for the chopping block where, moments later, her head will be cleaved from her body.  Sir John Brydges, the lieutenant of the Tower, gently guides her to her death; his heart-breaking solicitude increases the emotional pitch of the picture.  Even the executioner directs his gaze away, awed by the enormity of the sin he is about to commit.  Look at how he shifts his weight to one leg, his right hand almost releasing the axe.  Delaroche manages to depict different emotional reactions from the players of this tragedy, inspiring a multitude of emotional responses from us, the viewer. 

Preparatory Drawing By Delaroche 

If yesterday’s picture, The Children of Edward, fills us with melancholy, Jane Grey is deeply, wrenchingly, viscerally moving.

Wisely, Delaroche keeps the representation of their surroundings to minimal gray-tones and subtle stone carvings.  The bare stage, if you will, maintains focus on the figures and the deeply human connection is never lost.  The one non-human touch of any significance is the straw surrounding the block; this, if nothing else, underscores the horror to come when we realize that it is there to soak up the young girl’s blood.

If we wonder how or why Delaroche was able to connect so viscerally with this particular historical incident, it would do well to remember that only a scant 40 years earlier, Delaroche’s countrymen cut off the heads of their own aristocracy.

By any cultural yardstick, this is a magnificent and moving painting.   

More Delaroche tomorrow.

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.

Gérôme Week Part I -- Harem Women Feeding Pigeons in a Courtyard

Welcome to this, the 75^th post on The Jade Sphinx.

Readers interested in art – both as connoisseurs and artists themselves – could hardly do better than spending a week in the company of Jean-Léon Gérôme ( 1824–1904).  One of the most celebrated artists and teachers of his era, Gérôme still has much to teach us.  With that in mind, we will spend the next five days looking at some of what I think are Gérôme’s finest pictures, and examine the components that make them so interesting.

Gérôme was born in Vesoul; his father was a goldsmith, and his mother a merchant's daughter. Gérôme  was something of a prodigy at school, receiving prizes in chemistry, physics and oil painting.  He started his drawing lessons at age nine and his painting tutorials at 14.  At 16, he went to Paris to study with Paul Delaroche (1797-1856).

Gérôme was a very popular student – much as he would later become a much admired and beloved adult.  He was invariably friendly and often helped out fellow students with food or pocket money.  During his third year at the atelier, the school closed following a bout of depression suffered by Delarouche.  His wife, Louise (daughter of painter Horace Vernet) had died, and a fellow student had died in a duel.  Gérôme accompanied his teacher on a trip to Rome along with two other artists, helping the older man overcome his despair.

Gérôme would later call this period in Rome the happiest of his life.  He spent his time looking at great masterworks and studying antiquities.  However, he also came down with typhoid and his mother had to come from Vesoul to care for him.  Gérôme returned to Paris in 1844 and finished his studies with Charles Gleyre (1806-1874).  Gleyre also taught Monet, Renoir and Whistler, and was also an enthusiast of the Near East – an enthusiasm that would be shared by Gérôme. 

Gérôme lived during a great period that could well be called the era of the Artist Adventurer.  At a time when travel involved health risks, physical discomforts and potentially lethal hazards that we in 2011 can only imagine, Gérôme spent much of his time exploring the world.  His first trip to Turkey happened in 1855, when he went there to make studies for a large official commission.  Afterwards, he visited Egypt in 1857.  Later travels included a three-and-a-half month excursion to the Middle East with eight friends; by this time he had learned Arabic and was a seasoned traveler as well as a lively and convivial companion. Leaving from Marseilles, they disembarked at Alexandria and journeyed up the Nile to Cairo and Giza prior to taking a train to Suez and a safari to Mount Sinai via the east bank of the Dead Sea.  Gérôme and company then moved on across the peninsula of Aquaba to Petra and finally to Jerusalem.   Later, he visited Syria and Judea, as well as Turkey, Spain and Algiers, Holland, Greece, London, Sicily and Italy.

To these travels in historical perspective – most of these places were impossibly far, distant and exotic to the average 19^th Century European or American.  And while I’m not suggesting that Gérôme was Indiana Jones with a paintbrush, I am saying that his travels were an act of heroism and exploration of a type that is no longer possible in our shrinking world.  Other adventures for Gérôme include fighting a duel and viewing the opening of the Suez Canal – in short, the swashbuckling Gérôme makes the squalid episodes in the lives of 21^st Century “street” artists look like weak tea, indeed.

Between periods of intense work and travel, Gérôme found time to marry and have a family -- four daughters and one son, Jean (who wished to be a painter, as well, but died in his 20s).  As Gérôme  aged, he became a celebrated teacher and something of a national institution.  He was a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, and entitled to a full military funeral when he died.  His Requiem Mass was mobbed by the public, attended by the President of the Senate, the Director of Fine Arts, the former President of the Republic, the mayor of Vesoul and many painters and writers.  He is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in front of the statue of Sorrow he had cast in memory of his son Jean.

Near the end of his life, Gérôme was a vocal critic of the Impressionists.  An intelligent and perceptive man, he saw the tides of artistic training and taste changing.  Artists were giving up on drawing, on intensive training, on historical perspective, and giving themselves over to ‘feeling’ and ‘expression’ – abandoning discipline, intellectual and compositional rigor, and a centuries-old artistic tradition.  He saw the writing on the wall, and it was the first tragic step that would lead to later, more risible absurdities like Jackson Pollack, David Hockney and Marcel Duchamp.

Like many of the artists of this period who traveled to the Orient (which, at the time, was anything east of Istanbul), and who painted what they saw there, Gérôme was called an Orientalist.  Today’s picture, Harem Women Feeding Pigeons in a Courtyard, is a wonderful evocation of this style.

The composition of the picture is remarkable, ‘reading’ across the canvas from left to right a through-line of action.  The white veiled women are each distinct individuals by the color of their robes and the poise of their individual poses.  The woman feeding the pigeons extends her hand in easy grace, Gérôme depicting the birdfeed as it gently drifts towards the ground.  Look at her robe – the color is unmistakable – the same gentle tint of blue used by artists for centuries when depicting the Virgin Mary.  I cannot with certainty say that Gérôme consciously wished to evoke the Madonna, but this figure in blue feeding the flock of pigeons has a distinct Christian feel.  Surely it is significant that the light catches some of the pigeons, bleaching them dove-white, and that angels also have wings. 

The palace guard, however, in red robe and high, white hat, is a true outsider to the scene.  Unlike the women, his face is uncovered, but his skin is dark and his robe a distinct and dramatic military red.  One of his arms is behind his back, his other occupied in front of his body – he is not in any way involved in her act of charity and nourishment, which is particularly feminine.

The birds are masterfully done, flying in-and-out of shafts of bright sunlight.  Their shadows are cast on the sun-drenched steps, and they nest in the beams overhead.  The sense of flight is complete, with elegant wings suspending them mid-air, mixed with a sense of both delicacy and movement.

The most fascinating thing Gérôme does in this picture is, perhaps, the way in which he has captured the lofty space of the courtyard.  The pillars have support beams stretching back to the wall, providing a sense of depth; the pillars on the left are partially lit by the sun, providing a sense of height and scale.  One can almost feel the cool recesses of the space, hear the coo of the birds, and, perhaps, watch where one steps.

The door behind the birdfeeder leads into darkness and the cooler recesses within, while the window to the right opens out into the sun and open air.  This enclosed space –and Gérôme was a master of the enclosed space – is fully realized and complete.

More Gérôme tomorrow!