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Audio guide to works from the NGA exhibition French Paintings from the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, shown at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 7 November 2003 – 15 February 2004
30 Episodes
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Léon-François Bénouville's splendidly modelled figure of Achilles intrudes into the space of the viewer. He literally steps beyond the surface of the canvas. Thus, in the painting's careful attention to the human form and in the precision of its modelling of paint, it fulfils ideally the task of the painted academic figure studies required of Prix de Rome winners.
Bénouville's painting of Achilles, a popular subject for nineteenth-century painters, shows the Greek hero at the moment where, after quarrelling with his leader, Agamemnon, he retreats from battle to his tent in a rage. Humiliated, Achilles refuses to continue fighting with the Greeks, who subsequently suffer a series of catastrophic defeats. As Agamemnon's envoys enter Achilles' tent, in the hope of convincing him to return to battle, Achilles springs to his feet, launching into a tirade. With a dramatic realism, Bénouville renders this precise, violent moment.
Due largely to the fact that he spent much of his adult life working outside of the country, and because of the very flexible nature of his work, which often shifted dramatically between styles and themes, Sébastien Bourdon’s work has often been ignored in France. Bourdon was, it was thought, a chameleon, whose skill was more in mimicry than innovation.
But as the comprehensive exhibition of his work at the Musée Fabre in 2000 demonstrated, Bourdon’s career is now regarded somewhat differently. Painted in the last years of his life, The Lamentation brings forward many of the painter’s fine attributes: dense, clear colours, emphatic modelling of form, and a dynamic composition that crystalises a series of often competing references, including Nicolas Poussin. As Bourdon often instructed his students, great innovation could be achieved by casting one’s interests far and wide.
Nicolas Poussin is one of France’s greatest painters. Venus and Adonis is an important example of the mythologies he painted in Rome during the 1620s. In Rome, the artistic centre of Europe, Poussin absorbed the lessons of classical antiquity and the Italian masters. Poussin’s innovation was to merge these influences with an often astonishing realism, refined through extended on-site study of nature and the figure.
Venus and Adonis presents an idyllic depiction of the ancient world. Seen at sunset, Venus and Adonis share their love in a landscape peopled with cherubim. Both landscape and figures are painted with a free and light touch. In this way, nature weaves all together: the humid haze of the Italian summer evening, the vibrant sun that dances indiscriminately over and warms foliage and bodies, and the lovers.
However, scholars have determined that the original painting was cut in two, the left hand side showing a river god in a landscape is now in a private collection. This might account for the enigmatic nature of the Musée Fabre’s painting and its narrative, where a series of figures, seemingly lost in worlds of private pleasure, are both entangled in the richly described landscape yet isolated from each other.
Simon Vouet’s Allegory of Prudence is one of the Musée Fabre’s most significant paintings. It is remarkable as much for its formal bravado – its contorted arabesque lines, its statuesque forms, its dramatic lighting effects – as for its historical importance.
Allegory of Prudence was painted for the recently widowed Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, as part of a large commission to decorate the Palais Royal, Paris (1643–1647). The ambitious Regent – at the time the subject of a series of scandals, including a rumour that she had secretly married the powerful, scrupulous Cardinal Jules Mazarin – is depicted as the figure of Prudence, one of the four Cardinal Virtues from classical and religious texts. The beautiful, virtuous Regent is seen untroubled by the effects of the material world, whether the passage of time personified by the old man at her feet or politics and skulduggery, which she is literally above.
Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of Alphonse Leroy is widely recognised as among the painter’s greatest portraits. In its sobriety, its scientific attention to surface effects and details, and its effort to produce an image of its sitter as psychologically complex, it forms a direct line to his many later, exceptional depictions of Napoleon Bonaparte.
David’s portrait of Leroy says as much about the social identity of the figure of the artist as it does about its subject. In his sparsely furnished study, wearing a turban, and taking notes from his copy of Hippocrates’ The Diseases of Women, the gynaecologist is seen as something of an ascetic genius. So, in turn, is the artist; he is, as the contemporary definition of genius asserted, one gifted with powers of close observation and the ability to imitate nature above those of ordinary men and women.
Jean-Louis Demarne’s career was not that of a powerful Academician. He was instead a painter who actively sought out and capitalised on the taste of middle-class collectors. Influenced by the highly finished landscapes and genre scenes of Dutch painters currently in vogue among Parisian collectors, Demarne’s landscapes and genre scenes found an eager audience in France and abroad.
A Ferry and Boats on a Canal is an excellent example of Demarne’s picturesque depictions of everyday rural life. It uses the compositional convention of a central vanishing point that became something of a trademark for the painter. The landscape itself is quite generic, it could be Holland, Flanders or Northern France. Demarne is an important example of a commercially-minded artist who generally resisted participation in contemporary politics in favour of the private patronage of the burgeoning middle class.
François-Xavier FABRE, The Dying Saint Sebastian [Saint Sébastien expirant] 1789, oil on canvas 196.0 (h) x 147.0 (w) cm
In Florence to avoid revolutionary Paris, François-Xavier Fabre circulated in largely English aristocratic circles and generated a prominent reputation as a painter of portraits and landscape souvenirs for tourists. In the face of this commercial activity, he struggled to produce work that accorded with his academic training.
The Death of Narcissus provides a compelling response to this conundrum. It recounts the mythological narrative of Narcissus, a handsome youth who, indifferent to the affection of others, is condemned to fall in love with his own image in a forest pool. Narcissus fades away, losing both his senses and his beauty, as he desperately attempts to possess his own image.
While the work is suggestive of the Academic genre of history painting, it represents an early historical landscape. Fabre had just read Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s famous Elements of Perspective (1799–1800), which sought to elevate the landscape genre to an Academic status similar to that of history painting. Valenciennes argued for landscape painting that was both highly learned and paid close attention to the study of nature. Fabre’s canvas represents an important example of an historical landscape, painted two years before the Académie in Paris created a special Grand Prix for the genre.
Louis Gauffier’s Vallombrosa and the Arno Valley Seen from the Paradisino is a landscape that brings together a series of often competing influences and sources: close attention to the details of nature; Neo-classicism’s mathematical description of space; ‘nature’ as it was described at the time by the poet and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and, in turn, the Romantic ideal of man and nature in harmony.
By bringing these disparate sources together, Gauffier produces a theatricalised landscape. The terrace in the foreground acts as a stage, beyond which the landscape is both warm and awesome, a place to wander and find one’s self, as the monk on our left indicates. The landscape unfolds in a series of layers, where men might come to recognise their democratic sensibility and their individualism.
Jules Laurens undertook an incredible three-year journey throughout the Middle East and Asia Minor to Persia in the late 1840s, as part of a scientific and geographical expedition. Despite incredible hardship, Laurens drew every day. These drawings and the journey provided the basis for a significant career as an Orientalist painter and illustrator, and as a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs.
This work was painted almost twenty-five years after the journey. Based on his meticulous drawings, the painting depicts a mosque near Tabriz in present-day Iran. The imposing building stands in an austere, snow-covered landscape. The painting depicts the desolate conditions of a journey marked by weather extremes and ever-present danger. The snow, while beautiful in the painting, made the journey extremely treacherous and the expedition’s leader was temporarily snow-blind.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was one of Europe’s first celebrity painters. He built a reputation on instructive paintings that covered the edifying themes of the education of children, the virtues of a simple, provincial family life, and the heroism of everyday activities.
Epiphany depicts a peasant family participating in the annual celebration of the gateau de roi (a Catholic feast held each year on the 6th of January), where the children search for a bean hidden in the king’s cake, the finder of which will become king for the day. Just as the philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were asking the country’s bourgeoisie to rid themselves of the distractions and trappings of civilisation – to return to nature and a moral, family life – Greuze’s Epiphany makes clear the simple (if completely illusory) pleasures of the honest, peasant family, uncorrupted by the temptations of modern, bourgeois life.
The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote during the eighteenth century of the importance of education. Rousseau argued that all children are born ‘naturally good’, and that education and experience could cultivate and affirm this natural goodness. It was the responsibility of families and society, Rousseau found, to enable this goodness.
Noël Hallé’s painting illustrates this principle with the help of an image drawn from Roman history. The widow Cornelia, daughter of a great warrior, receives an ostentatiously dressed visitor. In response to the rich fabrics and the precious jewellery of the visitor, Cornelia, referring to her children, asserts ‘These are my jewels.’ Cornelia is the supreme example of the virtuous mother, who places the emotional, intellectual and moral needs of her children above materialism. Note her simple clothing and hair and her inquisitive, upright children; two of them, Tiberius and Gaius, would go on to become great leaders.
Vertumnus and Pomona is undoubtedly Jean Ranc’s greatest work. This beautiful painting depicts the effort of the god of gardens and orchards, Vertumnus, to woo the notoriously indifferent goddess of fruit trees, Pomona. Disguised as an old woman, Vertumnus lures Pomona into his trust with the story of a suitor who commits suicide, traumatised by the lack of attention from a beautiful, but intractable woman.
The work was painted by the Montpellier-born artist shortly before his departure for Spain, where he developed a successful, life-long career as a portrait painter. Ranc’s training as a portrait painter is certainly apparent in the delicate treatment of the faces of his subjects and, more so, in the exquisitely rendered fabrics. The painting is also significant for the manner in which it presents a mythological narrative and its moral subtext in an entirely contemporary manner, as indicated in Pomona’s radiant, silky dress and parasol.
A winner of the Prix de Rome in 1704, Jean Raoux became famous for his depictions of Vestal Virgins. These paintings described the virtues of chastity and maidenhood, an image he often contrasted with that of the modern bourgeois women, whose excesses and narcissism were at odds with moral virtue. Raoux’s reputation became such that the philosopher Voltaire described him as the equal of the great Dutch painter Rembrandt.
Dido and Aeneas suggests Raoux’s interest in Rembrandt and other Northern European painters. Note the attention paid to particular surfaces, especially the exquisite rendering of the satin (an effect for which Raoux was well known), and its broad range of lights and darks. These influences are distilled with Raoux’s observations of Italian painting, made while resident in Rome, where he studied and copied the finest moments of classical antiquity and Renaissance painting. The scene itself, a moment from Virgil’s account of the fateful love of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, and the founder of Rome, Aeneas, is rendered in terms closer to everyday life than classical antiquity.
Popularly known as ‘Robert des Ruines’, Hubert Robert built a lucrative career out of his imaginary ancient towns, cities, museums and gardens in picturesque decay. The Bridge is one such fantastical image, depicting the château in Dieppe populated by figures going about their everyday lives – a woman bathing, men herding livestock across an ancient, imaginary bridge.
Robert’s work was deeply influenced by his time in Rome during the 1750s to 1760s, a place he described as a city of ruins and of everyday life, where decaying mementoes of history (the Forum, the Colosseum) and contemporary life rubbed shoulders. Rome was also in the middle of an archaeological fever, spurred in part by the discovery of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, sites Robert visited in 1760. The painting represents a memento mori; a reminder, as one critic noted at the time, that everything must die.
Joseph-Marie Vien presented this sketch in a six-part submission for pre-selection for the 1743 Prix de Rome. Based on the unresolved nature of the paintings, it was a surprise to many that Vien was deemed eligible for competition and eventually won the prize. While this was reflective of the declining state of the Prix, with its unfashionable privileging of history painting at the expense of the pastorals and allegories that had become fashionable, the award was prophetic. Vien would become France’s most highly awarded painter and its leading teacher, and one of the earliest exponents of the Neo-classical style.
The subject of Vien’s painting suggests something of this historical context. Joshua, a disciple of Moses and his successor, leads the Israelite invasion of Canaan and the Promised Land. During a final, fraught battle for the town of Gibeon, Joshua prays for extended daylight so as to assure what would become a great victory.
The central theme of François-André Vincent’s moving painting Belisarius is tolerance. The subject of the work is the illustrious Roman general who, according to legend, was wrongly accused of conspiracy against the emperor Justinian, blinded and forced to lead an itinerant life as a beggar. This was a popular subject at the time among both painters and writers.
The painting records the moment when the pitiable Belisarius is recognised by one of his former soldiers. The soldier’s shame at finding himself in the presence of the maligned general is palpable. Through this painting Vincent sought to propagate tolerance and unity, during a period of intense political and social upheaval shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution of 1789.
Frédéric Bazille was a friend of Alfred Bruyas and became an important early member of the Impressionist movement in Paris, where he was associated with August Renoir, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley among others.
Bazille painted at least three different views of Aigues-Mortes near Montpellier, experimenting with different compositions and formats. While many of his early works have been lost, this rare early landscape is marked by the characteristics of the Provençal landscape tradition, including the work of Paul Guigou.
The scene stretches with clarity and precision from a low point of view to great effect, the marshy foreground opening up to the fortified port town. The painting captures the glorious colours typical of the region and evokes the sensation of the different surfaces by various techniques. The painting also makes clear Bazille’s interest in using the effects of light on surfaces as a means of defining mass and form.
Its pristine finish, sharp lines and sober palette place Alexandre Cabanel’s Albaydé at the heart of academic excellence. Indeed, the Montpellier-born Cabanel – a Prix de Rome winner in 1845 – was one of the last ardent academicians, determined to maintain the Académie’s strictures and hierarchies in the face of the radical challenges to it posed by, among others, Gustave Courbet.
The subject is drawn from Victor Hugo’s Orientalist poem ‘Fragments of a Serpent’, where the poet lusts for ‘the lovely doe-like eyes of Albaydé’. In a manner that owes much to Ingres’s languid nudes, Cabanel has depicted the lethargic figure of Albaydé as an object of visual pleasure, and also as an allegory. Albaydé was prepared as part of a triptych, the theme of which was the precariousness of the passage from youth to adulthood. Albaydé represented youthful innocence gone askew. It is compelling that she is depicted as a seductive, if dishevelled Oriental courtesan, in a space suggestive of the Islamic lounge, a harem and an opium den.
Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot trained in the Neo-classical tradition of painting, and progressively developed a highly personal vision of landscape. His stay in Italy (1825–1828) was a formative experience, since it encouraged him to study nature in the open air.
In this delicate painting from the Salon of 1847, Corot has created a carefully balanced composition; the shapes of the trees leaning across the space and the surface of the river lead the eye into the painting. The work depicts the unchanged activity of fishing, yet transforms the scene into an idyllic image that emphasises the eternal harmonies between man and nature. The work is imbued with softness through the use of tone, reflection and its depiction of the sky.
Corot’s influence on later painters was significant, particularly amongst the Impressionists; he was, importantly, a teacher of Berthe Morisot.
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