William Frederick Yeames (1835–1918), who died a century ago today, is one of the many painters who is now known by a single work: in his case And when did you last see your Father? (1878). As a history painter in the day of the Pre-Raphaelites, his career was something of an uphill struggle, and in some ways, it is fortunate that one work is still remembered.

The son of a British consul in Russia, he was born in Taganrog, on the shore of the Sea of Azov, to the north of the Black Sea, then in the Russian Empire. His father died when he was only seven, so he was bundled off to Dresden in Germany to be educated, and to start learning to draw and paint. His family brought him back to Britain, where he received private tuition before travelling to Florence at the age of only 17. He studied there, and copied the Masters, before returning to London in 1859.

In England, he formed what became known as the Saint John’s Wood Clique, with Philip Hermogenes Calderon, Frederick Goodall (1822-1904), and George Adolphus Storey, who are today even less well-known that him. At the time, though, his paintings had quite a decent following, and he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1859 on.

Yeames’ particular interest, and the basis for many of his best paintings, was the Tudor and Stuart period. In Hiding the Priest (1868-74), he shows a ‘priest hole’ used to hide Catholic priests during several purges which took place in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The room shown here is now known as the Punch Room, in Cotehele House, a superb sixteenth century manor house on the border between Devon and Cornwall, to the north of Plymouth, England.

A priest is shown ascending into the hidden chamber by ladder, as one of the family, at the left, watches for the arrival of ‘pursuivants’ who pursued Catholic priests during a purge.

For the Poor from about 1875 shows two nuns collecting food door-to-door to feed the poor during a bitter winter, probably at the edge of Dartmoor, Devon.

Like most of Yeames’ history paintings, And when did you last see your Father? (1878) is plausible but imaginary rather than based on historical records. It shows a Royalist household during the English Civil War between 1642-51. The men present are Roundheads, Parliamentarians, who are trying to locate and capture the head of the household, the small boy’s father.

The boy is based on Gainsborough’s famous portrait of The Blue Boy (1779), modelled here by the artist’s nephew. Although he is being questioned quite amicably if not sympathetically, the question put to him in the title of the painting exploits the openness of childhood in an effort to get the boy to betray his father’s whereabouts, an unpleasantly adult trick. Next in line is an older girl, who is being comforted by a Roundhead soldier, but is already upset.

Their mother and an older daughter wait anxiously at the far left.

Yeames was particularly fascinated by the strange story of Amy Robsart, shown here in his 1877 narrative painting of her. She was the first wife of Lord Robert Dudley, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth and allegedly one of her loves if not lovers. Elizabeth acceded to the throne late in 1558, and Dudley was called to court as her Master of the Horse. His wife Amy, née Robsart, did not follow him to court, and hardly ever saw her husband.

On the morning of 8 September 1560, when she was staying at a country house near Oxford, she dismissed all her servants, and was later found, as shown here, dead with a broken neck at the foot of the stairs. Although an inquest found no evidence of foul play, and returned a verdict of accidental death, Amy’s husband was widely suspected of having arranged her death. Speculation continues to this day.

Yeames shows Amy’s body at rest at the foot of the stairs. In the gloom above, Anthony Forster, one of Dudley’s men, is leading his manservant down the stairs when they discover Amy’s body. The implication here is that Forster murdered Amy on Dudley’s orders, which is one of many speculative accounts.

Later, Yeames painted this portrait of Amy Robsart (1884).

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, problem pictures became popular, in which viewers were encouraged to speculate over their underlying, usually melodramatic, narrative. Defendant and Counsel (1895) is one of Yeames’ several problem pictures, which would have been exhibited in London, and illustrated as an engraving in newspapers.

It shows an affluent married woman wearing an expensive fur coat, sat with a popular newspaper open in front of her, as a team of three barristers and their clerk look at her intensely, presumably waiting for her to speak.

As she is the defendant, the viewer is encouraged to speculate what she is defending: a divorce claim, or a criminal charge? This also opens the thorny issue of counsel who discover that a defendant is lying, but still mount their defence in court, and may succeed in persuading the court to believe what they consider to be false. Like And when did you last see your Father? this may be an exploration of truth and the problems posed by it.

Yeames died at the age of 82, on 3 May 1918, in the Devon Riviera resort of Teignmouth. And when did you last see your Father? was bought by the Walker Gallery in Liverpool shortly after it opened. A tableau of the painting has been in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London for most of the intervening years too.

Further reading

The Story in Paintings: Philip Hermogenes Calderon 1, the Bible and morals
The Story in Paintings: Philip Hermogenes Calderon 2, Shakespeare and the naked saint
The Story in Paintings: Problem pictures, John Collier and others

When reading a novel or watching a movie, many of us enjoy a surprise or twist in the plot. There are whole genres, such as detective fiction, in which such surprises are expectations, and the word whodunit was coined around 1930 for such stories.

Vera Tobin’s superb, and very readable, study of surprise in plot, published just a month ago, looks at many examples drawn from literature and film. In this and the next two articles, I’m going to see how this has been tackled in narrative paintings.

Verbal stories and movies have the great advantage that they are serial forms: their plots can twist and turn through time, leading the reader/viewer through the misleading and confusing, before bringing them to recognition, surprise, and plot resolution. The painter has no such luxuries; unless they tell their story in a series of images, they have to accomplish all or any of these in one, which the viewer will see in a single look.

One solution is what I call multiplex narrative, in which two or more scenes from a story are shown in a single image, such as Duccio’s The Healing of the Man born Blind from his Maestà Predella Panels of about 1310. Much of the panel is taken up by the first scene, in which Christ is healing a man we know – from the Gospel story – is blind. The surprise is revealed at the right, where he is sighted, and looks up in wonder and amazement.

This surprise is subtle, and not only dependent on reading the painting, but on knowing the story of this miracle.

Masaccio is more sophisticated and elaborate in The Tribute Money (1425-8), one of his marvellous frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. He packs in three separate scenes, in non-linear arrangement. In the centre, a tax collector asks Christ for temple tax. At the far left, as directed by Christ and Peter’s arms, Peter (shown a second time) takes a coin from the mouth of a fish: the surprise. At the right, Peter (a third time) pays the tax collector (shown a second time) with that coin.

It took the ingenuity of post-Renaissance artists to incorporate references to multiple scenes in a single, instantaneous narrative image. One of its greatest exponents was Nicolas Poussin, whose Rinaldo and Armida from about 1630 encapsulates a lot of story and more overt surprise.

The narrative is here taken from one of Poussin’s favourite literary works, a then-popular epic poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), a prodigy of the late Italian Renaissance, titled Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), and published in 1581.

Today, unless you’re a scholar of Italian Renaissance literature, you’ll see the surprising image of a pretty young woman on the one hand about to murder a sleeping knight with a dagger, and on the other hand caressing his brow. It is that conflict which brings surprise, albeit still subtle, implicit recognition, and reveals the twist in the plot.

The sleeping knight is Rinaldo, the greatest of the Christian knights engaged in Tasso’s romanticised and largely fictional account of the First Crusade, who has stopped to rest near the ‘ford of the Orontes’. On hearing a woman singing, he goes to the river, where he catches sight of Armida swimming naked.

Armida, though, had an evil aim. She had been secretly following Rinaldo, intending to murder him with her dagger. As the ‘Saracen’ witch who is trying to destroy the crusaders’ campaign, she had singled out its greatest knight for this fate. Having revealed herself to him, she sings and lulls him into an enchanted sleep so that she can thrust her dagger home.

Just as she is about to do this, she falls in love with him instead – and this is the instant, the twist or peripeteia (to use Aristotle’s term), shown here. A winged amorino, lacking the bow and arrows of a true Cupid, restrains her right arm bearing her weapon. Her facial expression and left hand reveal her new intent, which is to enchant and abduct him in her chariot, so that he can become infatuated with her, and forget the Crusade altogether.

Just a few years later, another of the greatest masters of visual narrative painted perhaps the most surprising work of all.

The first time that you see Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-1638) in the flesh, it’s a thorough surprise, in its imagery, composition, colours, lighting, and its very painterly facture. And it never ceases to surprise. Showing a relatively minor episode from the Old Testament book of Daniel, Rembrandt creates surprise using every trick in the book.

Belshazzar is a hopeless case: his father Nebuchadnezzar had his arrogance crushed when he learned of God’s sovereignty over mankind. The son is more obdurate, even when his great feast is thrown into disarray by a disembodied hand writing incomprehensible words on the wall. Daniel is summoned, who interprets the message as warning that Belshazzar “has been weighed and found wanting”; the blasphemous king is killed later that night, and his kingdom taken by Darius the Mede.

As Belshazzar watches the hand writing on the wall, his eyes are nearly popping out. His left arm is raised, and the right has to steady himself against a salver on the table, having already knocked over one of the temple vessels.

A couple of the guests sat to his right show astonishment, looking not at the wall but at Belshazzar, directing our gaze at him too.

To Belshazzar’s left, a woman in a bright red robe is also transfixed by the writing on the wall, sufficient that she has tipped the contents of the goblet in her right hand onto the floor.

I now skip forward over a century to an artist much better-known for his portraiture.

Sleep doesn’t come easily when your twin boys are eight months old. For Alcmene and her husband Amphitryon, that sultry night was broken as one of them, Iphicles, started sobbing loudly. When his parents got out of bed to investigate, this is what they saw, as painted by Pompeo Batoni in The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle (1743). Surprise is something of an understatement, for there is Iphicles’ brother, who had recently been renamed Heracles, quietly strangling a couple of snakes. At eight months.

Batoni uses the cover of darkness to enhance the dramatic effect. A tiny oil lamp is the sole illumination. Mother and father – actually step-father, as Zeus was Heracles’ natural father – are bent over, peering through their sleep and the darkness to see what is plain to us, the most surprising infant portrait in the history of painting. There are no theatrical expressions, no wild gestures, as what you see is a complete surprise.

Hera, the wife of Zeus, had given the infant the snakes in a bid to kill him, in spite for her husband’s repeated infidelity. Heracles, though, was made of sterner stuff.

The night is a time for surprises, with things that go bump, ghoulies and ghosties.

For Henry Fuseli, it is the time of The Nightmare (1781). What could be more surprising for the young woman whose head and arms are falling out of bed, than a daemon sat on her abdomen, and the head of a blind black horse poking through the drapes?

Thomas Rowlandson was an astute observer of people and society, and his undated small watercolour sketch of Reflections, or the Music Lesson is an excellent example of his work, and a good demonstration of surprise, even if its narrative is thin and brief.

An old man sits in front of the fireplace, above which hangs a large mirror. This gives him a view behind of his daughter, who is playing the piano as her music teacher sits close to her. That is what we see: the image seen by the old man is of the couple embracing and about to kiss, which enrages rather than merely surprises him.

James Gillray was another perceptive caricaturist and satirist of the day. In his etching and aquatint of The Hand-Writing Upon the Wall from 1803, he borrows the story of Belshazzar’s feast and recasts it with Napoleon on the throne. Gillray cleverly quotes from Rembrandt, with wineglasses and bottles being knocked over by Napoleon’s outstretched arms, but he also uses different techniques to express this version of surprise. For example, Napoleon’s eyes aren’t about to pop out, but those of the man to the left of him, who is looking at Napoleon rather than the writing on the wall, are.

Reference

Vera Tobin (2018) Elements of Surprise, Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, Harvard UP. ISBN 978 0 674 98020 4.

In the first of these three articles about surprise in narrative paintings, I traced the development of techniques to add a surprising twist to stories told in single paintings, from Duccio in about 1300 to the turn of nineteenth century.

So far, with the exception of the Masaccio, the cause of surprise in each of these images has been visually substantial, and in some cases has dominated the composition. Masaccio’s coin-bearing fish, though, was sufficiently small as to require careful study of the painting. My next example takes this a step further, for very good reason.

Géricault’s monumental painting of The Raft of the Medusa completed in 1818-19 shows a well-known and scandalous story of the day, in which over 130 people on board the French frigate Méduse died when they abandoned onto a makeshift raft. Just fifteen of the 147 people on that raft survived thirteen days before being rescued, and gave harrowing stories of drowning, dehydration, and cannibalism.

After a series of studies, Géricault showed the moment at which the rescuing ship, the Argus, is first seen, as no more than a dot on the horizon. So the cause of surprise is as barely visible to the viewer, as it would have been to those survivors. This puts the viewer in the same raft as the survivors, and some may feel sufficiently drawn into the surprise as to want to wave at that distant ship in the hope of rescue.

The nineteenth century brought many challenges to narrative painting, but in France it was still promoted by the prestigious annual Prix de Rome. The chosen theme for competitors in 1832 was a story about surprise with an unusual twist, Theseus Recognised by his Father.

Theseus, founding father of the city of Athens, was the illegitimate son of the incestuous relationship between his father and Theseus’ half-sister. Left to grow up with his mother, he came to travel to join his father, the King of Athens, bearing the sandals and sword which his father had hidden beneath a large rock. He had to use these to prove his identity to his father.

By the time that Theseus reaches his father’s court, the city and throne are in disarray, and the king is cohabiting with the sorceress Medea, who has promised him a son and heir. She convinces King Aegeus that Theseus is trying to wrest the throne from him, and that his best course is to poison his still-unrecognised son with a cup of deadly aconite.

Just as Theseus is about to put this toxic cup to his lips, Aegeus recognises his sword, thus that his guest is no usurper, but is his son – a major change in fortune indeed. The king knocks the cup away, is re-united with his son at last, and Medea suddenly becomes superfluous and unwanted.

Antoine-Placide Gibert’s entry, which turned out to be the runner-up, shows the moment of recognition, the king’s right hand just about to knock the goblet of poison from Theseus. Two expressive faces are lit brightly: the king, mouth agape and eyes wide with surprise, and Medea, with a face like thunder as she realises that her conspiracy has been foiled.

This plot, although dependent on knowledge of the story, is similar to many detective and crime novels, and is thoroughly well-told in this single painting.

Hippolyte Flandrin’s winning entry that year shows a few moments later, the poison goblet resting on the table on its side, and King Aegeus in a very similar position as in Gibert’s version. Apart from its neoclassical style, its narrative is expressed more weakly, with little facial expression or body language, and its surprise barely cocks an eyebrow.

One story which came back into fashion after she was declared a symbol of the French nation in 1803 is that of Joan of Arc, Jeanne d’Arc.

Léon-François Bénouville’s Joan of Arc Hearing Voices, probably painted between 1845 and his early death in 1859, shows her wide-eyed surprise on being called in a mystical experience. Once again, body language is used to great effect, with Joan’s arms tensed, even down to her hyperextended toes.

Bénouville uses the sky to show Joan’s accompanying visions. Instead of depicting these as distinct from the clouds, as might have been done in earlier religious works, Saints Margaret, Catherine, and Michael are here worked into the cumulus forms heaped up over a town ablaze in the distance, itself a visual link to the wars between the English and French, and perhaps to Joan’s own later martyrdom.

As Joan was being rediscovered, classical narratives were revived too.

Twists and surprise are frequent features of the narrative paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme, from which I have chosen Phryne before the Areopagus (1861) as perhaps his most visually arresting.

Phryne was a highly successful and very rich courtesan (hetaira) in ancient Greece who, according to legend, was brought to trial for the serious crime of impiety. When it seemed inevitable that she would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly.

Gérôme shows a whole textbook of responses to surprise among the members of the court, although Phryne herself is covering not her body, but her eyes; each of the men in the court, of course, is looking straight at her. The artist also follows an ancient colour coding scheme, in which the flesh of women is pale, almost white, in contrast to the more sallow skin of men.

Henri Regnault, another great history painter of the time, painting the shocking Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Grenada (1870), with its careful use of colour contrast reinforcing the red of the blood spilled on the steps.

Although the Prix de Rome continued to promote narrative painting, corruption in its adjudication put some potentially great artists off for the rest of their careers.

In 1875, the young Jules Bastien-Lepage submitted The Annunciation to the Shepherds, was unsuccessful, and for the remaining few years of his career he abandoned history/religious painting. To emphasise surprise, he makes the angel as incongruous as possible: it is painted in almost Renaissance style using gold leaf and distinct colours. The two shepherds have facial expressions and body language which speaks plainly of their surprise.

The following year, Domenico Morelli painted another popular religious motif of surprise in The Conversion of Saint Paul (1876): a fine example of peripeteia, and composed in a way which remained faithful to the story and delivering maximum visual impact.

Myths remained a popular platform for expressing surprise.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Perseus and Andromeda from 1891 is traditional in its approach. Andromeda has here been attached to a rock by the sea, to appease the sea monster Cetus which has been destroying coastal cities of her parents’ kingdom. As the monster has returned to kill and eat the young princess, who should arrive on the scene but Perseus, fresh from his trip to kill Medusa the Gorgon.

Although at variance with most accounts, Leighton shows the hero astride the winged horse Pegasus, who grew from the remains of Medusa, loosing his arrows at Cetus. Andromeda has been twice surprised, with Cetus then Perseus, Cetus is certainly surprised to be coming under attack from Perseus, and Perseus is surprised to have discovered the beautiful Andromeda in her predicament.

Reference

Vera Tobin (2018) Elements of Surprise, Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, Harvard UP. ISBN 978 0 674 98020 4.

In the second article of this series, I looked at the depiction of surprise in narrative painting during the nineteenth century, when it seems to have flourished. Even relatively minor narrative artists painted some fine examples.

Félix-Henri Giacomotti, a friend of William Bouguereau, painted this satirical scene of Forbidden Literature in 1886, with two interrelated surprises. Five young women have found their way into a private library containing ‘forbidden literature’, and are showing various signs of surprise and shock at what they have discovered and read there. They have then been surprised by the entry of an older woman, possibly their mother, who clearly wasn’t expecting to find them swooning over explicit content.

Surprise became such a popular theme of paintings at the end of the century that at least one artist, Gaetano Chierici (1838-1920), almost made it his speciality.

In Chierici’s undated The Mask Prank, a young boy is still laughing as his mother scolds him for surprising and upsetting his younger sister, who is now crying at her mother’s skirts. As in Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, the young girl has dropped her spoon, and mother may have dropped and broken something too.

Chierici’s undated A Scary State of Affairs shows another childhood surprise, when an infant has been left with a bowl on their lap, and that room is invaded first by chickens, then by large and aggressive geese. The child’s eyes are wide open, their mouth at full stretch in a scream, their arms raised, and their legs are trying to fend the geese off.

In Britain, a new sub-genre appeared, in which surprise was often key: the problem picture. Among its most successful exponents was John Collier (1850–1934).

In Collier’s The Prodigal Daughter (1903), an elderly middle-class couple are seen in their parlour in the evening in their sober black clothes and sombre surroundings. They are surprised when their prodigal daughter turns up out of the blue, in her low-cut gown with floral motifs and scarlet accessories.

Father is still sitting, backlit by a table lamp to heighten the drama. Mother has risen from her chair and is visibly taken aback. Daughter stands, her back against the door and her hand still holding its handle, as if ready to run away again should the need arise. Collier also uses ingenious shadow play, a device which became popular in the nineteenth century perhaps with the advent of optical projectors: here the mother’s cast shadow makes her appear much larger than the daughter’s, like an ogre bearing down on a child.

Facial expression is even more vital in Collier’s The Sentence of Death (1908), where a medical practitioner has just told a man of his fatal condition. The patient stares at the viewer, in complete shock, while the doctor looks instead at a large book on his desk, detached from his damning message. The viewer is left to decide the nature of the man’s illness.

There were light-hearted paintings of surprise too.

In Louis Béroud’s The Joys of the Flood (in the Medici Gallery) (1910), Rubens’ huge painting of The Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles (1621-25) has burst into life, as its water starts to flood the Louvre and its three nudes step out onto the floor. The painter shown painting this painting is, of course, Béroud himself, adding another wry twist to what must be his finest work.

In spite of all claims and fears, narrative painting did not die in the twentieth century, although there were times when it might have.

Lovis Corinth continued to paint classical myths, including this famous scene of surprise, in Homeric Laughter (1909). It shows a story from Book 8 of Homer’s Odyssey, where the hero is being entertained by King Alcinous of the Phaeacians. The bard Demodocus tells the well-known tale of the illicit affair between Ares/Mars, god of war, and Aphrodite/Venus, god of love and wife of Hephaistos/Vulcan.

When Hephaistos surprises his wife Aphrodite making love with Ares in their marriage bed, instead of being angry, he forges a very fine but unbreakable net, throws it over the couple to prevent their escape, and summons the other gods, who come to laugh at the ensnared couple.

As Ares tries to disentangle his body from that of Aphrodite, in her nudity she only seems to care about covering her eyes (like Gérôme’s Phryne). Other masters had painted this story before, but no other artist quite captures the surprise or the ribald humour.

Corinth was not afraid to return to the use of multiplex narrative either, in his painting of two surprises in Ariadne on Naxos (1913). Theseus (left) had promised Ariadne (naked on his thigh) that he would marry her after she helped him kill the Minotaur on Crete, but surprises her when he abandons her on the island of Naxos. Ariadne is then surprised by the arrival of Bacchus in his chariot, who surprises himself by falling in love with and marrying her.

Surprise in narrative painting has still, today, refused to die. My final example comes from one of our finest modern painters, Stuart Pearson Wright.

Although inspired by the movie An American Werewolf in London, and an episode in the artist’s life, Wright’s Woman Surprised by a Werewolf (2008) is unusual among narrative paintings in not relying on the viewer’s knowledge of extraneous sources. A naked, buxom young woman is running away from a werewolf which is baring its teeth and sexually aroused. She has clearly been caught by surprise, her mouth is wide open as if screaming, but her face shows an odd combination of fear and lust.

For the viewer, perhaps the greatest surprise is of seeing a naked woman and werewolf together in a barren wood in the dead of the night.

There are many more well-known paintings which have been made between 1300 and the present which depict surprise in a narrative context. I have in this short series shown a selection which illustrate some of the techniques which have been developed to show surprise in the figures in a painting, and to surprise the viewer.

Most consistent among these are the traditional elements of facial expression and body language, which were prescribed by Alberti as rules. Innovative artists have extended these to include composition, lighting, the use of colour, actions such as tipping of drinks and dropping objects, incongruities and contradictions, direction of gaze, large or small size of the object of surprise, backward and forward reference in narrative, nudity, skin tone, style, and more.

Depicting such an abstract concept as surprise, and telling stories with surprise, may at first sight appear a tough challenge. It is one to which narrative painters have risen, to the point where some have told new stories successfully, for which the viewer doesn’t already know the story. That really is a mark of success.

Reference

Vera Tobin (2018) Elements of Surprise, Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, Harvard UP. ISBN 978 0 674 98020 4.

Most classical myths were told in paintings during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with narrative masters such as Rubens often painting them two or more times. Very few remained almost undiscovered and untold until the nineteenth century.

The story of Pandora and her ‘box’ is one such myth which was almost unknown in painting until 1850, when it suddenly became very popular. This article and the next look at most of the surviving paintings telling this tale.

One reason for Pandora’s late discovery is that her myths appear in less popular sources: Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. These are among the oldest of the Greek anthologies of myth, dating back to around 750 BCE, even now are not as accessible as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and deal with more ‘difficult’ stories.

The story of Pandora and her ‘box’ is told most fully in Works and Days, where she is the original woman, created by Hephaestus (Roman: Vulcan) for Zeus, as punishment for humans receiving the gift of fire which had been stolen by Prometheus. After she was formed from earth by Hephaestus, other gods gave her properties which determined her nature.

Athena dressed her in a silvery gown, and taught her needlecraft and weaving. Aphrodite shed grace on her head, together with cruel longing and cares. Hermes gave her a shameful mind and deceitful nature, together with the power of speech, including the ability to tell lies. Other gifts were provided by Persuasion, the Charities, and the Horae.

Pandora also carried with her a large earthenware jar (pithos, in Greek) containing toil and sickness that bring death to men, diseases, and a myriad of other pains. Zeus gave her as a gift to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus. She then opened her jar, and released its evils into the earth and sea. The only thing remaining in the jar was Hope, who stayed under its lip.

This marked the beginning of the second age of mankind, its Silver Age, in which people knew birth and death, as humans had become subject to death, and Pandora brought birth too. In later accounts, Epimetheus married Pandora, and the couple had a daughter Pyrrha, who married Deucalion with whom she survived the flood.

As with other classical myths, at the time that Jean Cousin painted Eva Prima Pandora, in about 1550, it had been mixed with Christian religious narrative, in this case of Eve and the Fall of Mankind. No longer clothed in Athena’s silvery gown, Eve/Pandora lies naked, propped against a human skull. Her left hand clutches the dreaded jar, which she has not yet opened.

Her right hand holds a fruiting sprig of the apple tree, an allusion to the traditional Biblical story of Eve. Coiled around her left arm is a serpent, another reference to the Fall of Mankind.

When William Etty painted her, in Pandora Crowned by the Seasons of 1824, the significance of the crux of the story, Pandora opening the jar, had become lost in the other detail. Besides, it gave Etty the opportunity to paint a statuesque and almost naked young woman.

It was the now-forgotten Henry Howard who first painted The Opening of Pandora’s Vase in 1834. Pandora, more correctly dressed, crouches to duck the torrent of woe, evil and pain which streams from the jar, as Epimetheus tries in vain to reseal its lid. This is the story as told by Hesiod in his Works and Days.

At some time between about 1834 and 1860, the story of Pandora with her jar of evils became confounded with that of Psyche, who had a box which she could not open. The result was the tale still told about Pandora and her box of evils.

This undated painting attributed to Louis Hersent of Pandora Reclining in a Wooded Landscape gives this revised account, with the box firmly shut in Pandora’s right hand, and the motif an uncommitted combination of landscape, nude figure, and weak narrative.

In the 1870s, this suddenly became one of the most popular subjects for mythological paintings. This doesn’t appear to have been the result of it being told in another creative medium, though.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first painting of Pandora, completed in 1871, shows a moody, brooding Pandora, modelled by Jane Morris. She has just cracked open the lid of the jewelled casket held in her left hand, and it emits a stream of noxious red smoke. As this coils around her head winged figures appear in the fumes.

This was one of Rossetti’s earlier paintings of Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris, and the subject of Rossetti’s late passionate obsession. It was commissioned by John Graham for 750 guineas, who was so pleased with the result that he exhibited it, against Rossetti’s wishes, in Glasgow the following year. Graham had made his money in cotton manufacture and trade with India, and was a keen collector of Pre-Raphaelite art.

Rossetti’s source for the story of Pandora was most probably Lemprière’s dictionary of classical mythology, which erroneously referred to Pandora’s box, not jar. The inscription on the side of the jewel casket reads “Nascitur ignescitur”, meaning born of flames.

Jules Lefebvre was another artist who painted Pandora more than once. This initial version from 1872 shows her walking with the fateful box held in both hands, its lid firmly shut. Ominous smoke rises from a series of fumaroles in the ground around her. She is nude, wears an unusual coronet, and there is a six-pointed star above her head.

Next was Alexandre Cabanel’s portrait of the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson as Pandora, from 1873. As a portrait rather than a faithful account of the myth, the box is closed, almost concealed, and its significance suppressed.

In 1877, the elderly Paul Césaire Gariot’s Pandora’s Box places her in a primeval world of rock, studying the closed box intently, wrestling internally with the desire to open it.

The following year, Dante Gabriel Rossetti make a chalk study for a second painting of Pandora, again using Jane Morris as his model. Her face shows a faint agony this time, as a decorative golden stream emerges from the crack in the lid. Here the inscription reads “Ultima manet spes” – hope remains last, a candidate perhaps for Rossetti’s own epitaph.

Reference

Wikipedia on the myth of Pandora.

The ancient Greek myth of Pandora had been almost unknown in paintings until the nineteenth century. During the 1870s, it suddenly became a popular theme for paintings in both Britain and France, but its narrative had altered from the original in showing the Greeks’ first human woman with a box containing the ills of the world, rather than a large earthenware storage pot.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema sought a compromise in his Pandora of 1881, in which she held not a box but a small pot, suitably decorated with a Sphinx. In what appears to be a skilfully-painted watercolour, Pandora has not yet given way to the temptation to open the pot.

Jules Lefebvre’s second painting of Pandora made in 1882, a decade after his first, also places her in profile next to the sea. She has a star just above her forehead, but that has become five-pointed rather than six, perhaps to dodge any Jewish connotations. His previous gentle narrative has all but vanished too.

The story of Pandora broke out of Europe by 1883, when Frederick Stuart Church painted his more illustrative Pandora (1883). Dressed more modestly (presumably for a wider audience), she is shown as an innocent young woman kneeling on a large golden chest as she tries to close its lid and stop the stream of red demons emerging. I suspect that this was painted as an illustration for a printed collection of classical myths.

In his later years, William-Adolphe Bouguereau chose an oddly androgynous model for his depiction of Pandora in 1890, but has rather lost the narrative. Her neutral expression, body language, and the closed box tell little of what is about to come.

One of his lesser-known paintings, John William Waterhouse’s Pandora from 1896 is a major depiction of this myth, and one of the most complete.

Set by a small brook in a dark, primeval forest, her box has become a large gold chest encrusted with precious stones and decorated with mythological motifs. Pandora kneels by its side, peeking inside as she carefully raises its lid. But even this tentative glimpse is sufficient to release its stream of ills, of which she appears unaware.

I wonder whether the rush of demons from the box is suddenly going to overwhelm, snatching the lid from her hand, and throwing her into panic to try to close the chest again.

Ernest Normand is one of few painters to show a later moment, in which Pandora (1899) bends low to duck beneath the swirling grey clouds of evils as they spread out into the idyllic world beyond, causing blossom to fall as petals to the ground. Her jar is only hinted at, behind her bilowing white robes, almost depriving the viewer of this vital cue to the original story.

I have been unable to find a date for this presumed illustration by the great Arthur Rackham of Pandora, but suspect it was made around the turn of the twentieth century, and intended to accompany a British English retelling of this myth.

As with Church before, Pandora is young and innocent in her nakedness. She gazes up in awe at the batlike demons as they escape from the open lid of her large wooden chest, seemingly unaware of what she is unleashing in her curiosity.

Thomas Benjamin Kennington shows Pandora (1908) in the final phase of regret and sorrow, after the evils have all been released. Her box, now empty, with no sign of the remaining Hope, rests on her thigh. She hangs her head in shame, resting it on her right hand as she weeps at what she has done. Unfortunately the released demons shown at the left edge are so dark that they are quite hard to see.

Over this period, other artists had also been painting the story of the creation of Pandora, a theme which I have avoided in these two articles. I will, though, show one of the more unusual works depicting this, a painting which was lost for forty years.

John Dixon Batten’s The Creation of Pandora was painted somewhat anachronistically in egg tempera on a fresco ground by 1913. Batten was one of the late adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and now almost forgotten. It had been exhibited in a commercial gallery, and was acquired by the University of Reading, England, shortly before the First World War. Deemed unfashionable in 1949, it was put into storage and quietly forgotten until its rediscovery in 1990.

Pandora is at the centre, having just been fashioned out of earth by Hephaestus, who stands at the left, his foot on his anvil. Behind them, other blacksmiths work metal in his forge. At the right, Athena is about to place her gift of a robe about Pandora’s figure, and other gods queue behind her to offer their contributions.

Just before the start of the war, Odilon Redon made a series of studies leading to a radically different presentation of Pandora’s story.

Redon’s undated pastel study of Pandora shows her clasping her box close in the midst of very large floral images.

Redon’s finished oil painting of Pandora from about 1914 shows her more clearly, surrounded by a garden of exquisite and exotic blooms, referring to Eve’s Paradise before the Fall. She holds her box to her bosom, in the midst of succumbing to temptation to open it, but Redon stops just short of showing its evils pouring out.

My final representation of the myth of Pandora is a photograph from 1919 by the society portrait photographer Yvonne Gregory (who also worked under her married surname of Park): Pandora. The box lies wide open by her knees, as Pandora is bent double in distress over it, her left arm over her head to shelter her from the demons which have been released, and in grief at what she has done.

Given the disasters which had struck the world in the years immediately preceding this photograph – the mass carnage of the war, and the influenza pandemic which followed it – it must have had great impact when it was published in 1919.

The myth of Pandora rose to fame during the late nineteenth century, a time when painters were responding to tragedies such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and increasing awareness of the ills within society.

In some ways, and for its time, it was a curiously misogynist tale, attributing the release of all the ills in the world to its first Eve-like woman. Its continuing popularity through the twentieth century is even more questionable.

As a visual story, it has a moment – when Pandora first opens the jar or box and its demons start to escape – which is pictorially and narratively compelling, but relatively few painters chose to depict that. From this view, Henry Howard (1834), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1871, 1878), Frederick Stuart Church (1883), John William Waterhouse (1896), and Arthur Rackham told the story optimally.

And despite claims that narrative painting was dying during this period, these paintings are splendid evidence to the contrary.

Reference

Wikipedia on the myth of Pandora.

Sometimes my eye is caught by a single painting by an artist I haven’t come across before. This takes me to look at their other work, and not infrequently a welcome surprise. On this occasion, it took me to Berthold Woltze (1829–1896), whose biography is almost as short as they come.

He was born in Havelberg, a town built on an island in the Havel River, in Germany. He became a professor at the Weimar Saxon Grand Ducal Art School, among whose directors have been Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Lenbach, and Albin Egger-Lienz. Many of his paintings of genre scenes were engraved and published in the Gartenlaube (‘the garden arbour’) illustrated weekly newspaper, which was a forerunner of the modern magazine. He also painted portraits.

And that’s all we seem to know about him. I think that there’s more, and looking at his paintings, I think that he may have been an early exponent of what is known in Britain as the ‘problem picture’.

As in other countries in Europe, many Germans migrated to North America during the nineteenth century. A Letter from America from about 1860 shows an elderly mother and father eagerly reading a letter which they have received, presumably from their migrant son, and brother to the young woman, who looks as if she might consider going too.

Woltze’s undated The Letter gives us fewer clues. A young mother has just received, opened, and read a letter. She leans against the massive stone hearth, looking badly crestfallen, as her young daughter holds her arm and looks up at her mother’s face. The mother has been peeling potatoes, which are now scattered on the floor, and in her apron. Her shoes are badly worn, and she is clearly not well off.

The letter’s envelope lies on the floor, at the lower left corner, but gives no further clues. This is clearly bad news, and probably about her husband. Is he wounded, missing, dead, or has he left her?

Reading Good Advice Is Expensive! from 1873 is aided by its title, and some of the clues in the painting. An older man and woman are talking just below a sign which reads Justiz (‘justice’), and looks like the entrance to a court of law. He is quite roughly dressed, and carries on his back a load of papers which are almost certainly legal in nature. This makes him a legal clerk/messenger, either working for lawyers or the court.

The woman wears black over her otherwise brightly-coloured clothing, suggesting that she may be a widow. She is most probably asking the man for legal advice, perhaps in relation to the death or estate of her late husband. His response is likely to be the title of the painting.

The painting which caught my eye is Der lästige Kavalier (1874), rendered into English as The Annoying Bloke, I suggest.

It is set in a railway carriage, where there are two men and a young woman. She is dressed completely in black, and stares towards the viewer with tears in her eyes (detail below). Beside her is a carpet-bag, and opposite is a small wooden box and grey drapes.

Leaning over the back of her seat, and leering at her, is a middle-aged dandy with a brash moustache and mutton-chop whiskers, brandishing a lit cigar. He appears to be trying to chat her up, quite inappropriately, and very much against her wishes. Behind him, and almost cropped off the left edge of the canvas, is an older man with a dour, drawn face.

The young woman has suffered a recent bereavement, and may even be travelling back after the funeral. She looks too young to have just buried a husband, so I think it more likely that she has just lost her last parent, and is now living alone, and prey to the likes of this annoying and abusive bloke.

This sub-genre became very popular in Britain during the late nineteenth century: the problem picture, which encouraged speculation as to its narrative, even to the point of being the subject of columns in and letters to newspapers over the period 1880-1900.

Woltze’s other paintings include run-of-the-mill genre works such as his undated In the Tavern which has no tantalising narrative clues, just a couple of men in extraordinary hats.

Departure, also undated, is, like his letter paintings, a popular and fairly simple story.

Double Portrait (date not known) is more open to speculation, though. Two young women are talking in a garden or park. They may be sisters, or cousins, perhaps. The older has just revealed a secret to the younger, and sits plucking the petals off a daisy flower. The younger looks pleasantly surprised and curious, as if waiting for the older to tell more.

The last painting by Woltze which I have been able to locate (although the quality of the image is not good) is an undated scene showing a Young Gypsy under Arrest, a sadly common sight across Europe at the time. Next to the gypsy woman is a large tambourine, as if she had been engaged in dance or entertainment at the time. A young girl is bringing the woman a plate of food and a large mug of drink, walking fearfully in as if the gypsy were a sleeping ogre. Behind is her father, the jailer, holding open the door.

Having not come across a ‘problembild’ in Prussian painting before, I’m curious: was Woltze unusual, or were there others who painted similar works? Did they too become a popular pursuit in the same way that they did in Britain?

If one of the aims of studying history is to gain an understanding of the past, art history has failed miserably to accomplish that for the late nineteenth century. Whether viewed in the Salon, the commercial gallery, or the teaching studios of the École des Beaux-Arts, the dominant French painter for much of that period was Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904).

Gérôme was also one of the most vociferous opponents of the Impressionists, and by the end the century had fallen into disfavour. But learning history without getting to grips with both sides is a bit like ignoring King Harold in an account of the Norman Conquest of Britain, or omitting the Confederates from the American Civil War.

Each time that I look at one of Gérôme’s narrative paintings, I see something new, a reading that I had not noticed before. Whenever I browse his works, I see another painting which fills me with curiosity. It’s true that many are sheer spectacle, but behind their popular appeal there’s often much more.

In this series, I’m primarily going to look at his narrative paintings, and to suggest some readings which I think do them justice. As his career spanned times of momentous change in France, and Gérôme often moved in high places, I will attempt to explain what was going on around him, when relevant to his paintings.

Gérôme’s first painting to be shown at the Salon, in 1847, was made during a time of increasing tension as the ‘July Monarchy’ neared collapse. The following year, France underwent revolutions, leading to Napoleon III’s coup in December 1851, and the Second Empire. During this, much of the city of Paris was razed to the ground, and rebuilt according to the grand designs of Baron Haussmann. But it too ended in disaster, when France’s crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 brought the Third Republic with its extensive social change and modernisation. Gérôme died in his studio just a decade before the start of the First World War.

Gérôme trained in the studio of Paul Delaroche, a great history painter, and for about three months with Charles Gleyre, who later taught Whistler, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Frederic Bazille. He joined a group of artists known as the ‘Néo-Grecs’ (Neo-Greeks), who favoured light and witty scenes from the classics, and rejected the serious and sober approach of neoclassicism. His first bid for fame failed, when his entries in the Prix de Rome in 1846 found no favour with its judges. He then painted his first significant work, The Cock Fight (1846), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1847.

This motif had started from a relief showing two adolescent boys facing off against one another. Gérôme felt that he needed to improve his figurative painting, and after Delaroche’s advice decided to develop that image by replacing one of the boys with a girl. In both Greek and English – but not French – the word cock is used for both the male genitals and a male chicken, and the youthful Gérôme must have found this combined visual and verbal pun witty and very Néo-Grec.

There is a curious ambivalence in its reading too: two cocks are fighting in front of the young couple. Is one of the birds owned by the girl, and if so, is it the dark one on the left, which appears to be getting the better of the bird being held by the boy? Either way, it is a lightly entertaining reflection on courtship and gender roles, and a fine debut.

The Cock Fight earned Gérôme a third-class medal, and he sold the painting for a thousand francs. With the benefit of favourable reviews from critics, the following year brought him lucrative commissions, and a growing reputation.

Gérôme followed that with Anacreon, Bacchus, and Amor in 1848. This harks back to the secret rites of Bacchantes, invoking Anacreon, one of the nine canonical Greek lyric poets – very Néo-Grec again. The poet takes centre stage with his lyre at his shoulder. Dancing at his feet are an infant Bacchus at the left, waving his thyrsus and looking to the left at a young woman playing the double pipes. To the right of Anacreon is Cupid (Amor), with his wings, bow, and quiver of arrows. Behind is a procession of men and women, and in the left distance they are dancing in a large circle.

This painting was exhibited in the Salon that year, from where it was purchased by the state for 1,800 francs. I can’t help but think that it must have been a suitable piece of escapism from the political tensions of the February Revolution which took place that year, leading to the Second Republic.

In 1848, the short-lived Second Republic ran a competition for a painting which would form its figure(head). Gérôme entered The Republic in that, but was unsuccessful. This is his improved entry for the second round, which is not too distant from the figure later used for the Statue of Liberty.

Of all these early works, it is Gérôme’s relatively small and simple painting of Michelangelo from 1849 which is the most enigmatic. Michelangelo is shown in his dotage, hunched over and blind, being led by a young boy whose dress would have aroused his master’s homoerotic desires.

The broken sculpture is the Belvedere Torso, a huge fragment of marble statuary which was so loved by the sculptor that it was nicknamed the School of Michelangelo. The young boy is leading his master’s hands to stroke and caress the marble, now that he was unable to enjoy looking at its classical – and very male – form.

This is perhaps the first sign of Gérôme’s developing theme of sight, and the role of vision in establishing truth. In his blindness, Michelangelo can only feel what we can see, and cannot see the figure of the young boy. This is particularly appropriate to Gérôme, who quite late in his career became a successful sculptor himself, and whose later paintings referred to his sculptures and his acts of creating them.

It is also thought highly unlikely that the Torso would have been in Michelangelo’s workshop at the time.

Gérôme met more criticism when he exhibited Grecian Interior, Le Gynécée in the Salon of 1850. One critic (Théophile Gautier) compared it to one of Ingres’ paintings, but it was more widely condemned for its immorality, as you could perhaps understand.

It has been disputed as to whether the scene depicted here is that of Messalina’s legendary brothel, or was inspired by a poem by Simonides of Amorgos considering the temperament of women. Its title states that it shows the women’s area or gynaeceum within a large Greek house, where the unmarried women relaxed and socialised with one another, a refuge to which the ‘woman of the house’ would return when not with her husband.

Despite its four well-lit nude women, there is more to this painting than their expanse of flesh. The woman resting on the couch, looking away from the viewer, appears to be in the early stages of pregnancy. Most of all, though, it is Gérôme’s first classical painting which he has filled with small clusters of apparently random objects – for example, at the right edge, and around the shrine to the left of centre.

Gérôme became almost obsessive in decorating his classical paintings with all sorts of bric-a-brac, like an old curiosity shop. Although he researched these extensively, many are now considered to be inappropriate or anachronistic, and some are just odd. Like the fine detail on the tiled floor, they enhance the impression of reality, giving many of his paintings what would now be termed a photographic quality over eighty years before colour photography became common.

Night (c 1850-55) is a small diversion which appears to have been completed by several different hands. It is typical of later paintings, particularly during the popularity of Aestheticism, of the personification of night.

One problem which Gérôme experienced throughout these early works was integrating his figures into the overall colour and look of the painting. Critics at the time commented on how his figures too often looked as if they had been pasted onto the canvas. This was less true of his Grecian Interior, but becomes quite prominent in this painting, The Idyll, also known as Innocence, or Daphnis and Chloe, from 1852, shown in the Salon of 1853. This is perhaps made worse by this painting’s lack of depth, and Daphnis’ sculptural appearance.

Gérôme’s former teacher Charles Gleyre had exhibited his own version of Daphnis and Chloe, perhaps a year or two earlier; the paintings are entirely different, although both feature the couple unclad.

With Napoleon III installed as the Emperor of France, and Gérôme’s early paintings generally well-received, it was time for the artist to tackle more substantial visual stories.

References

Ackerman GM (2000) Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Catalogue Raisonné Mis à Jour, (in French) ACR Édition. ISBN 978 2 867 70137 5.
Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds. (2010) Reconsidering Gérôme, Getty. ISBN 978 1 6060 6038 4.
Gülru Çakmak (2017) Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s, Liverpool UP. ISBN 978 1 78694 067 4.
de Cars L et al. (2010) The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Skira. ISBN 978 8 85 720702 5.

This week’s dip into the missing artists archive brings a painter whose fine academic finish mixed pastoral scenes with strong political messages, and whose grandson was an architect of modern France’s system of government: Édouard Debat-Ponsan (1847–1913).

He was born in Toulouse, and trained under Alexandre Cabanel at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, at the same time that Jules Bastien-Lepage was training in that studio. Indeed, Cabanel seems to have taught the majority of the most successful and popular painters of the 1880s.

Debat-Ponsan’s first well-known works were completed around 1870, but most now appear to have been lost. He served in the military during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and was a strong supporter of the Third Republic which succeeded it.

As told in the Old Testament book of Judges, Jephthah swore an oath that, should he succeed against the Ammonites, the first object (possibly animate) to come out of the doors of his house to meet him, when he returned, he would deliver to the Lord as a burnt offering. Unfortunately, the first object to greet him was his only daughter. She pleaded for two months’ stay of execution, during which she went into the mountains to “weep for her virginity”, but on her return was sacrificed as Jephthah had sworn.

In The Daughter of Jephthah (1876), Debat-Ponsan breaks with tradition in his depiction of this story, and shows the daughter, with various friends and maids, during her stay in the mountains as she ‘wept for her virginity’. The daughter in question appears to be the woman at the centre, who is looking directly at the viewer with a sultry, almost angry, expression, as her entourage are doing most of the weeping.

It is tempting to read this in the context of France’s crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and the defiance of the Third Republic in trying to make good the shortcomings of the state which it inherited. Otherwise it appears an odd treatment of the story.

The following year, Debat-Ponsan was awarded money to travel to Italy, although he did not win the Prix de Rome, where he became inspired to paint portraits.

The next painting that I have found of his is another unusual narrative work: One Morning in Front of the Louvre Gate (1880), which shows Catherine de’ Medici (in black) gazing impassively at the bodies of French Protestants who had been slaughtered in the massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1572. King Charles IX of France is said to have ordered this massacre, at least partly under the influence of Catherine, his mother, allegedly in fear of a (Protestant) Huguenot uprising.

The reading of Debat-Ponsan’s painting has relied for its context on the massacre of communards in the Paris Commune, which followed the Franco-Prussian War. The expressions and gestures of her court are in stark contrast to those of Catherine de’ Medici. One fine detail worth noting is the blood staining the blade of the sword held by the man to the right of Catherine, and his obeisant bow.

In 1882-83, Debat-Ponsan travelled with his brothers-in-law to Istanbul, where he became inspired to paint Orientalist works.

The best-known of those is The Massage. Hammam Scene (1883), which shows a woman undergoing massage in a Turkish Hammam, or baths.

In addition to his Orientalist paintings and portraits, Debat-Ponsan painted Naturalist scenes from the countryside, such as A Corner of the Vineyard from 1886. These appear to have been influenced by the success of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who had died only two years earlier. Although their clothing is patched, the farmworkers here are clean, well-nourished and wholesome, and he perhaps never fully embraced the Naturalist style.

The grandest of Debat-Ponsan’s paintings which I have been able to find is his wonderful depiction of the Muses in The Crown of Toulouse (1894) in the Salle des Illustres (Room of the Illustrious) in Toulouse’s Capitol building. This is perhaps the height of ‘municipal art’ in the Third Republic.

This unusual depiction of a Gypsy at her Toilet from 1896 is still idealised and idyllic, rather than showing the real-world squalor and dirt of life on the road. The gypsy’s caravan and white horse are almost theatrical. By this stage, Debat-Ponsan’s meticulous realist style was softening and becoming more painterly, as seen in the wayside flowers in the foreground.

Politics returned to Debat-Ponsan’s art in his Nec mergitur, or Truth Leaving the Well of 1898. This is generally accepted as being his statement on the Dreyfus affair, which corroded politics in France between 1894 and 1906. Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason in December 1894, for passing French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, and was imprisoned in the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony in French Guiana.

After a further investigation in 1896, which revealed another Army officer as the culprit, new evidence was suppressed, leading to the acquittal of that officer, and clumsy attempts to charge Dreyfus with additional crimes. France divided in its support for Dreyfus: Debat-Ponsan was firmly convinced of his innocence, and painted this work showing the naked Truth emerging from her mythological well and brandishing her mirror.

Sadly, although a bold public statement, as a work of art it is too closely related to Gérôme’s painting of Truth, which was exhibited two years before.

Most of Debat-Ponsan’s remaining paintings are pastoral scenes such as Rest in the Field (1901) above, and The Cowherd (1910) below, but they do show his increasingly painterly style.

Édouard Debat-Ponsan seems to have continued to paint until his death in 1913. His son, Jacques, was already on his way to becoming a celebrated architect, winning the Prix de Rome (in Architecture) in 1912, and his grandson Michel Debré (1912-1996) became the first Prime Minister of France under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, and one of those who drafted the constitution of the Fifth Republic, which continues today.

By the end of the Paris Salon of 1853, the young Gérôme had cause to celebrate. He was receiving good reviews, and his lightweight, amusing narrative paintings were going down well with the public. As the acknowledged leader of the small group of ‘Néo-Grecs’, he now needed a few more successes at the Salon.

He had a little money, and in late 1853 set off for Austria, central Europe and Moscow, but the Crimean War forced him to alter his plans and not travel as far afield as he had hoped. Instead, he followed the River Danube and the coast of the Black Sea down to Istanbul. With the Exposition Universelle coming up in 1855, he needed some paintings which would impress a more international public.

One delightful tondo which he painted during 1853, and which was lost for some years, is this Allegory of Night. Three winged putti bring together some of the classical symbols of night and sleep: that on the right, for example, is scattering sleep-inducing poppies, as in Virgil’s words in Book 4 of his Aeneid. This is the sort of painting which could win him valuable commissions for wall paintings, perhaps – just the sort of work which was becoming available with Napoleon III in power.

The Leap of Marcus Curtius (c 1850-1855) depicts a short and not too demanding legend of a hero of classical Rome. Following an earthquake (now dated to 362 BCE), a great bottomless pit opened up in the middle of the Forum. Attempts to fill it were unsuccessful, so an augur was consulted, who responded that the gods demanded the most precious possession of the state.

Marcus Curtius was a young soldier who proclaimed that arms and the courage of Romans were the state’s most precious possessions. In a moment of great self-sacrifice, he then rode into the pit in his finest armour, astride his charger – the moment that Gérôme shows. As he and his horse fell into its abyss, the chasm closed over him, and the city was saved.

Gérôme captures the stirring scene well, and makes its underlying patriotic moral clear: self-sacrifice may be necessary for the State.

Less successful was his vast and ambitious The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ, of which this is the study, painted in about 1855. The emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over the Roman Empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a traditional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the empire in the centuries to come.

Gérôme had based this on a synthesised history dating back to Jacques-Bénignes Bosquet in 1681, but its grand spectacle failed to captivate the critics or the crowds at the Exposition Universelle.

Instead, and perhaps mindful of the recent war in the Crimea, Gérôme’s more modest late entry of Recreation in a Russian Camp, Remembering Moldavia (1855) was much better received. The artist claimed to have witnessed this scene when travelling down the River Danube: a group of Russian soldiers in low spirits is being uplifted by making music, under the direction of their superior.

Gérôme has here captured an atmosphere which few of his paintings achieved. The marvellous light of the sky, the skein of geese on the wing, and the parade of windmills in the distance all draw together with the soldiers in their sombre greatcoats.

Overall, though, the Exposition Universelle had been a success for Gérôme, bringing him a Second Class medal from its jury, and later that year admission to the Legion of Honour. Soon afterwards, Gérôme left France to travel extensively in North Africa and the Middle East, and didn’t return until the Spring of 1856. He then submitted five paintings from ‘the Orient’ and two others to the Salon in 1857.

One of the works resulting from his travels, Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert (1857) shows a group of new recruits struggling through desperate conditions in the heat of the desert, referring back, perhaps, to his Russian soldiers.

From here on, a substantial proportion of Gérôme’s paintings are ‘Orientalist’; these are deeply mired in controversy, and have been ever since critics tackled them in the nineteenth century. I do not propose showing any of them, except those in which narrative is significant.

Gérôme’s success of the Salon in 1857 was The Duel After the Ball, the very antithesis of The Age of Augustus, with its contemporary anecdotal narrative and slapstick humour.

If the story is to be believed, on leaving a masked (fancy dress) ball in the winter of 1856-7, an elected official and a former police commissioner fought a duel in a copse in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. One was dressed as the character Pierrot, the other as Harlequin. Pierrot was wounded as a result, and the incident became notorious because of the personalities involved, and their comic costumes.

Pierrot leans, as white as his costume, collapsed against one of his team, his face suggesting shock if not imminent death from a wound bleeding onto his chest. His limp right arm still bears his sword, which now drags on the ground. Two other friends are visibly distressed at his condition and trying to console him.

Harlequin, with his second, walks off into the distance at the right. His sword is abandoned on the snowy ground, near four feathers which have dropped from the American Indian headdress of his second. In the murky distance there is a hackney cab, ready to take the combatants away, and a couple walking along the edge of the copse.

Gérôme uses the full range of conventional narrative techniques, with strong cues to the original story. He stages it theatrically, with the absurd grim humour of the participants’ costumes, referring to the comedy of Pierrot and Harlequin, making it intensely effective. This rapidly became one of the most widely reproduced paintings of its time, although Gérôme’s rival Thomas Couture was upset that his more academic version of the incident was largely ignored.

Gérôme was now an ideal candidate for a longer-term contract for reproductions of his paintings, and in 1859 made such an arrangement with Adolphe Goupil, whose galleries were to represent him and his work, most importantly promoting it in the growing US market. But at home he was coming under fire for succumbing to genre painting and anecdote, rather than keeping to the great tradition of history painting.

Gérôme’s response was to go back to three classical themes. Here, in Ave Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant (1859), it is the spectacle of the Colosseum in Rome.

Its story is simple, going no deeper than a translation of its title: Hail Caesar! We who are about to die salute you. A group of gladiators clustered in front of Caesar are just about to join the bodies of the last ones, who are still being dragged away by slaves. Some consternation was raised in Gérôme’s depiction of the Vestal Virgins – carefully positioned between the gladiators and Caesar – watching and enjoying such a depraved spectacle.

Despite its popular appeal, there is more to Ave Caesar than its expansive view and the roar of the crowd. The viewer is, as in so many of Gérôme’s paintings, not only looking at the spectacle, but also at those looking at the spectacle, ultimately themselves. This painting was so successful that Goupil continued to sell reproductions of it, some as small as a calling card, for the next fifty years.

The second classical theme was the strange legend of King Candaules (1859), which has been painted by several artists over the centuries, and can usually be relied on to raise controversy.

According to legend, King Candaules of Lydia boasted of the beauty of his wife, Nyssia, to the chief of his personal guard, Gyges. To support his boast, the king showed his wife to Gyges by stealth, naked as she was preparing for bed. When she discovered Gyges’ voyeurism, Nyssia gave him the choice of being executed, or of murdering the king. Opting for the latter, Gyges stabbed the king to death when he was in bed, then married Nyssia and succeeded Candaules on the throne.

Gérôme was probably aware of William Etty’s painting of the story from 1830, but would not have been aware that Edgar Degas had started and abandoned his version in 1855. Each chose to show the moment that Nyssia removed the last item of her clothing, which is prior to the climax or moment of peripeteia.

The king is in his bed, awaiting his wife, who has just removed the last of her clothing as she spots the dark and hooded figure of Gyges watching her from the open door. Gérôme’s love of detail in the decor saves this from the accusation that, like Etty’s, it was just another excuse for a full-length nude. However, neither Gérôme nor any of the previous artists who had depicted this story ever managed to provide clues as to its eventual outcome.

The third of Gérôme’s more traditional history paintings was the largest that he showed at the Salon of 1859, and one which attracted the open praise of Charles Baudelaire. Unfortunately it is one of Gérôme’s major works which has since vanished, its only traces being a monochrome photograph, and this graphite study of The Dead Caesar from about 1859. I will consider these in detail when I cover his second version of this motif completed in 1867, later in this series.

References

Ackerman GM (2000) Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Catalogue Raisonné Mis à Jour, (in French) ACR Édition. ISBN 978 2 867 70137 5.
Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds. (2010) Reconsidering Gérôme, Getty. ISBN 978 1 6060 6038 4.
Gülru Çakmak (2017) Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s, Liverpool UP. ISBN 978 1 78694 067 4.
de Cars L et al. (2010) The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Skira. ISBN 978 8 85 720702 5.

The third of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s history paintings shown at the Salon of 1859 sadly vanished after being sold in 1951, and is now known only from a monochrome photograph which I have been unable to find as a usable image. It attracted the open praise of Charles Baudelaire, and revealed Gérôme’s novel approach to painted narrative.

Before looking at Gérôme’s depictions of the murder of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March 44 BCE, it’s worth looking at two other paintings of this well-known motif.

Vincenzo Camuccini’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar from 1804-05 follows the traditional model: the conspirators surround the beleaguered Caesar, brandishing their blades, about to stab him repeatedly. He looks directly ahead at his friend Brutus, uttering the words, “Et tu, Brute?” which were actually put in his mouth by William Shakespeare.

Karl von Piloty’s The Murder of Caesar from 1865, six years after the Salon in question, shows a slightly earlier moment, with Julius Caesar sat on a throne in the portico of the Senate. Immediately behind him, one of the conspirators has raised his dagger above his head, ready to strike the first blow.

In the image above, I have tried to give an impression of how Gérôme’s huge Caesar of 1859 might have looked, by editing a detail from his surviving Death of Caesar, from the same year. There were, of course, details of the empty section of the curia in the upper right, and its projection was slightly different. The graphite drawing below may bear some similarities, as it was produced as part of the preparatory work which the artist made for both paintings.

The surviving painting, The Death of Caesar (1859), is smaller in size and much wider in its view, including Caesar’s dead body, his departing murderers, even a senator sat far back at the right.

Both of Gérôme’s paintings of the dead Caesar are unusual because they show not the moments before his murder, nor the murder itself, but some moments afterwards. This defies conventional wisdom and Aristotle’s teaching of the importance of peripeteia.

Gérôme gives the obvious clue of Caesar’s body, almost concealed in his toga, with a bloodstain prominent on the upper chest. The chair on which he had been sat is overturned amid the chaos and violence of the attack. As the conspirators depart, their backs to the viewer, they are brandishing their blades in triumph above their heads.

Caesar’s bloody footprints lead down from the chair over towards the petition with which he had been presented by Lucius Tillius Cimber immediately before he was killed. It rests by a floor mosaic depicting the head of Medusa, the Gorgon who was beheaded by Perseus.

Far off at the right edge is a lone senator, still sitting in his place. Although it has been suggested that he was asleep, that doesn’t appear supported by his posture. A white cloak has been abandoned in haste on a seat close to the front, scrolls are scattered, and some who were not part of the conspiracy are hurriedly making away in the distance.

Gérôme provides all the evidence from which we can construct the story, much as might be done in a detective novel – a literary genre which started to become popular in Europe and North America in the first half of the nineteenth century, and became well-known with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841.

The following year, Gérôme painted this contrasting portrait of Diogenes (1860), the Cynic who is reputed to have lived in a large storage jar or possibly a barrel as he attacked the conventional view. Surrounding him are four dogs, a delightful visual pun. The term cynic is derived from the Greek κυνικός (kynikos), meaning dog-like, the word which may be inscribed on the lantern that he is trying to light.

As has been explained:
There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them. (Wikipedia.)

Diogenes wasn’t exhibited at the Salon, but was sold in 1861 by Goupil’s London gallery for four thousand francs. I can’t help but wonder whether Gérôme saw himself as a Cynic.

In 1861-2, Gérôme painted three works which concern themselves with prostitution. It is worth remembering in this context that Manet completed his Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe in 1863, usually read as depicting contemporary prostitution in Paris, which was refused by the Salon and exhibited in the Salon des Refusés that year.

Phryne was a highly successful and very rich courtesan (hetaira) in ancient Greece who, according to legend, was brought to trial for the serious crime of impiety. When it seemed inevitable that she would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly.

Phryne is to the left of the centre, in the midst of the semicircular court, completely naked apart from some jewellery on her neck and wrists, and her sandals. She is turned away from the gaze of the judges, her eyes hidden in the crook of her right elbow, as if in shame and modesty. Behind her (to the left), her defence has just removed her blue robes with a flourish, his hands holding them high.

At Phryne’s feet is a gold belt of a kind worn to designate courtesans in France from the thirteenth century, with the Greek word ΚΑΛΗ (kale), meaning beautiful.

The judges, all men with bare chests and wearing uniform scarlet robes, are taken aback. Gérôme shows a whole textbook of responses from pure fright, to anguish, grief, or disbelief, with each of those men looking straight at Phryne. The artist also follows an ancient colour coding scheme, in which the flesh of women is pale, almost white, in contrast to the more sallow skin of men.

Superficially, it is easy to suggest that Gérôme was using Phryne’s nakedness to appeal to the lowest desires, which remained one of the popular attractions of the annual Salon. However it is more likely that this is a statement about attitudes to the nude female form and the judgement of the Salon. The timing of Gérôme’s narrative moment is far more conventional, and conforms to Aristotle’s peripeteia and the novellist’s moment of surprise.

It was exhibited at the Salon of 1861, and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, but critics like Émile Zola were harsh in their judgement, dismissing it as “antique rubbish”. Perhaps they also missed its compositional similarity to images of art students painting in a life class.

In his other narrative painting of that year, Gérôme told the story of a Greek statesman and general who in his youth used to sneak off and consort with courtesans: Socrates seeking Alcibiades in the house of Aspasia (1861). A pupil of Socrates, who appears to have had a pederastic relationship with the young Alcibiades, it was the philosopher who came and dragged his charge away from the clutches of Aspasia and her friends.

According to classical accounts, Alcibiades was so attracted to courtesans that he continued to enjoy their company after he married, which unsurprisingly led to his wife to try to divorce him.

Gérôme’s painting had been a commission for Sultan Abdul Aziz, and was exhibited in the Salon of 1861. Two years later, it was sold by Goupil for 12,500 francs.

A year later, it was a more contemporary story of Louis XIV and Molière (1862) which Gérôme committed to canvas. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, universally known as Molière, was a highly successful playwright who enjoyed the patronage of King Louis XIV.

It is based on a story published in the memoirs of Madam Campan in 1822, in which Molière had been treated with disdain by the courtesans at the royal palace of Versailles. When the king heard about this, he invited the playwright to dine with him, which would impress the court and enhance Molière’s credibility with the courtesans.

Although an apocryphal story of dubious merit, this had been painted by Ingres in 1857. Gérôme’s purpose seems to have been for the greater glory of the Emperor Napoleon III. This painting was exhibited at the Salon in 1863, and sold by Goupil from there for 25,000 francs. It was later exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, by which time it was already in American ownership. In 1923, it was bought by William Randolph Hearst.

Over a period of just three years, from Caesar (1859) to Louis XIV and Molière (1862), Gérôme had swung from the staidly conventional to the highly novel, and had covered the themes of assassination, cynicism, prostitution, and looking. He was at the height of his narrative powers just as the Second Empire was about to turn sour.

References

Ackerman GM (2000) Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Catalogue Raisonné Mis à Jour, (in French) ACR Édition. ISBN 978 2 867 70137 5.
Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds. (2010) Reconsidering Gérôme, Getty. ISBN 978 1 6060 6038 4.
Gülru Çakmak (2017) Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s, Liverpool UP. ISBN 978 1 78694 067 4.
de Cars L et al. (2010) The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Skira. ISBN 978 8 85 720702 5.

The great Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto was probably born in late September 1518, the first child in a family which was to grow to 21. His father, whose surname was actually Comin, was a dyer in the city of Venice, who had become nicknamed Robusti on account of his robust defence of the gates of the city of Padua during the recent War of the League of Cambrai.

Almost nothing is known about Tintoretto’s training. Some have claimed that he was taken for assessment in Titian’s studio, but was sent home from there after only a few days or weeks. Various reasons are given for this, some that Tintoretto was already such a good artist that he would never make a good pupil.

By May 1539, though, Tintoretto appears to have matriculated from the Arte dei Depentori so that he was able to work as an independent painter in his own right. To have done so would ordinarly have required him to have completed an apprenticeship satisfactorily, and there is no good evidence of the Venetian master to whom he had been apprenticed.

His first datable work, a painting of the Virgin and Child with saints and the donor Procurator Girolamo Marcello, is put at 1537-38, but its location is currently unknown. After that are a handful of surviving religious paintings between the late 1530s and early 1540s, and some fragments of fresco.

Tintoretto’s first substantial commission appears to have been for the young patrician Vettore Pisani, to decorate a room in his palace at San Paternian, near San Marco in Venice. Fourteen have survived and are now in the Galleria Estense in Modena, Italy. Painted on octagonal panels of about 130 x 130 cm, they appear to have been mounted in the ceiling, or at least towards it, and by convention their figures are viewed from below and greatly foreshortened as a result. I have been able to locate suitable images of thirteen of these, thanks to the photography of Sailko.

As they show scenes from some of the more famous myths told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, I will consider them in the order in which they appear in his text, and provide links to fuller articles examining those stories and their representation in paintings, in my recent series on the Metamorphoses.

Deucalion and Pyrrha in Prayer (1541-42) (E&I 19) refers to one of the early stories in Book 1 of Metamorphoses, covered here, and an account of a flood myth which sees this rather strange couple as the only survivors. Deucalion is shown on the right with his greying beard, and his wife Pyrrha clasps her hands in prayer on the left. Although Tintoretto makes clear with the statue behind them that this is pre-Christian, he shows the couple as devoted and devout. There is little to link them to the story of the flood, nor of the odd way in which the rocks that they ‘sowed’ were turned into humans.

Apollo and Daphne (1541-42) (E&I 13), which is detailed here, is an outstanding example of pictorial narrative. It shows the moment of peripeteia, at which Apollo catches Daphne, just as she is being transformed into a laurel tree. The billowing scarf, flowing hair, and Apollo’s legs tell of the pursuit which is just ending, and the abundant branches and leaves forming from Daphne’s arms tell of the tree which she is becoming.

Mercury and Argus (1541-42) (E&I 20) tries to tell a little of the complex interlinked stories of Jupiter, Io, Mercury, Argus, Pan, and Syrinx. A challenge to cover even in a series of images, Tintoretto has chosen the time in which Mercury is trying to lull Argus to sleep, so that Io (who has been turned into a cow) can be abducted by Jupiter. Mercury is certainly playing a flute-like instrument, but Argus doesn’t look too sleepy yet.

Fall of Phaeton (1541-42) (E&I 18) tells the famous conclusion to this story from Book 2 of the Metamorphoses,
detailed here, in which Phaeton loses control of the chariot of the Sun, and comes crashing towards the earth. Although not a particularly difficult climax to paint, Tintoretto provides the viewer with all the clues needed to complete the story, even down to a whip which is also tumbling down.

Minerva, Vulcan and Cupid (Birth of Erichthonius) (1541-42) (E&I 24) shows one of the less well-known embedded myths, examined here. Ericthonius had developed without a mother, from the semen spilled by Hephaestus (Vulcan) when he tried to rape Minerva. Ovid only actually tells of the daughters of Cecrops and the infant Ericthonius. Tintoretto shows Hephaestus/Vulcan at the left, about to try to rape Minerva, stood at the right, with Cupid quite inappropriately in the sky above them.

Jupiter and Europa (1541-42) (E&I 26) tells the popular myth of the rape of Europa, as detailed here. A very modestly-dressed Europa has just got astride the white bull, which is Jupiter in disguise, and is about to be whisked off over the sea to Cyprus. Unusually for this series, Tintoretto has added two figures for a more complex composition, but still gives the essential clues.

Jupiter Appearing to Semele (1541-42) (E&I 16), from Book 3, is a complex story which I think is almost impossible to tell well in a single image, as I have described here. The god is impressive, clutching thunderbolts in both hands, with his eagle flying below. Semele is shown below, but is not yet being consumed by fire, and there are few other clues to the origin or outcome of this scene.

Sadly, I have been unable to find an image of Tintoretto’s painting showing the tragic young couple Pyramus and Thisbe, from Book 4, but other accounts are shown here.

Niobe and her Children (1541-42) (E&I 22) tells a tragic consequence of human pride from Book 6, which I detail here. This is another masterpiece of narrative painting, which accomplishes a great deal in its brilliant composition. The arrogant and boastful mother Niobe is shown in a dark green dress, holding her arms up to Apollo and Diana above, who are raining their arrows down and killing her children around her.

Although Niobe’s arms are almost certainly not accurately projected and too large, they dominate the painting quite dramatically.

Lycian Peasants Changed Into Frogs (1541-42) (E&I 14) tells the once-popular story of Latona, who had given birth to the twins Apollo and Diana, and craved water to slake her thirst. When the local Lycians muddied the waters around her, she turned them into frogs, and provided an excellent visual story for many artists. Tintoretto is again very successful in expressing this in just five figures and a simple composition.

Apollo and Marsyas (1541-42) (E&I 15) tackles one of the most gruesome and horrific stories in the whole Metamorphoses: that of the music contest between the satyr Marsyas and the god Apollo, which ends with Marsyas being flayed alive. I have examined this here. Tintoretto pictures the contest, which thankfully leaves its outcome to the imagination of the viewer. Apollo is on the left, holding an anachronistic violin, as Marsyas on the right plays his pipe.

Priapus and Lotis (1541-42) (E&I 23) jumps ahead to Book 9, to a sub-story which is referred to by Ovid, but not told in full, of Priapus who pursued the nymph Lotis in an attempt to rape her. This is described here. Tintoretto shows the start of that myth, in which Priapus (who is remarkably shown clothed) discovers Lotis, rather than its ending in which she is transformed into the Lotus bush.

Eurydice Before Pluto (1541-42) (E&I 21) tells of another doomed couple, from Book 10: the well-known Orpheus and Eurydice. When Eurydice dies of a snake bite moments after their wedding, Orpheus is granted permission to enter the Underworld, and to try to take her back, as described here. Tintoretto shows the beautiful Eurydice pleading her case before Pluto, the king of the Underworld. This is another eloquent image, although a little richer in its details.

Race of Hippomenes (1541-42) (E&I 25) is the last of the myths, also drawn from Book 10 of the Metamorphoses, and detailed here. Hippomenes (man) challenged Atalanta (woman) to a running race, knowing that she was faster than he, but distracting her by dropping golden apples, which allowed him to pip her at the post, and win her hand in marriage. Although Tintoretto has painted a fine foreshortened figure of Hippomenes, in omitting his opponent and the crucial golden apples, the narrative is surprisingly weak.

Tintoretto’s Fables of Ovid is a remarkable series of narrative paintings for an artist at the start of their career. Technically, its challenges in perspective projection are substantial; as relatively small paintings which often had to tell complex stories, the conflicting demands for detail and simplicity are generally handled expertly.

Yet these panels are so often glossed over or omitted altogether in accounts of Tintoretto’s work. Not only that, he is usually considered to be primarily a religious painter, who had little interest in depicting narratives from myth.

When originally in place in the palace at San Paternian, these paintings must have been a wonder to see, and should have formed excellent talking points.

References

Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman (2009) Toward a new Tintoretto Catalogue, with a Checklist of revised Attributions and a new Chronology, in Falomir op cit.
Miguel Falomir (ed) (2009) Jacopo Tintoretto, Proceedings of the International Symposium, Museo Nacional del Prado. ISBN 978 84 8480 171 9.
Roland Krischel (ed) (2017) Tintoretto, A Star was Born, Hirmer (in German). ISBN 978 3 777 42942 7.
Tom Nichols (2015) Tintoretto, Tradition and Identity, 2nd edition, Reaktion Books. ISBN 978 1 78023 450 2.

By 1862, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) had reached the height of his narrative powers, exhibiting a succession of narrative paintings, several of which had been turned into prints and were selling strongly. His popularity had not gone unnoticed by the Imperial court, which was also at its apogee at the time.

In 1863, Gérôme married Marie Goupil, the daughter of Adolphe Goupil, proprietor of the gallery which was flourishing thanks to Gérôme’s paintings.

Gérôme articulated Napoleon III’s aspirations for empire in his elaborate formal painting of the Reception of Siamese Ambassadors by Napoleon III (1864), depicting a grand reception held at Fontainebleau on 27 June 1861. Gérôme had attended in the role of semi-official court painter (he was commissioned by the State), made sketches of some of the key figures, and was further aided by photographs made by Nadar. He also included himself, and the older artist Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891), in the painting: I believe that they are both at the back, at the far left.

This work was shown at the Salon the following year, where Degas and Monet exhibited their first paintings.

He continued his theme of empire with a painting of Cleopatra VII Philopator, known more widely as Queen Cleopatra, who had been the last active pharoah of Ptolemaic Egypt, ruling from 51 to 30 BCE. For much of this period she ruled jointly with relatives; in 51 BCE, when she was ruling with her ten year-old brother Ptolemy XIII, they fell out, and she tried to rule alone.

In 47 BCE, she took advantage of Julius Caesar’s anger towards her brother by having herself smuggled into Caesar’s palace in Egypt, so that she could meet with the emperor. Although she was probably smuggled in inside a large bag, this has traditionally and more romantically been described instead as a large roll of carpet. She became Caesar’s mistress, bearing him a son, and convincing him to fight and defeat Ptolemy’s army at the Battle of the Nile, restoring Cleopatra to her throne.

Gérôme depicted this in his Cleopatra before Caesar in 1866. Cleopatra is stood at the edge of the carpet from which she has just emerged, dressed (or undressed) for seduction. She looks at Caesar, her expression hard to read because of the angle of view of her face. Her breasts are exposed below an elaborate Egyptian jewellery collar, and wispy veils hang from a belt-like girdle slung from her hips. A slave cowers behind and to the right of her.

Caesar is seen working at his desk, looking up at Cleopatra, his hands held out as if trying to regain control of the situation. Behind Cleopatra several men, presumably Caesar’s counsel, are sat at a table.

This was shown at the Salon in 1866. At the time, the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps and his company were busy constructing the Suez Canal in Egypt, which opened under French control in 1869.

Gérôme was by his own admission not a religious man, and painted very few religious works. Of those Golgotha (Consummatum Est, or Jerusalem) (1867) is striking for its use of the shadows of the crucified, and for its exploration of the play of light, which was to become so central to Impressionism. This was exhibited to acclaim at the Salon of 1868.

Gérôme made several paintings showing the first Emperor Napoleon in Egypt, including this highly detailed and intricate version of General Bonaparte and his Staff in Egypt (1867). The French Campaign in Egypt and Syria had been in 1798-1801, so this was still relatively recent history, even when viewed from the distance of the final years of the Second Empire, and the near-completion of the Suez Canal.

This was also a historically relevant time to be painting the expeditionary successes of the First Empire: Napoleon III had demanded for France the left bank of the Rhine, Luxembourg, and Belgium the previous year, held an Exposition Universelle in Paris for much of 1867, and had been actively pursuing its empire in Mexico, Egypt, and south-east Asia.

The following year, Gérôme courted controversy when he depicted the execution of one of Napoleon I’s leading military commanders – a strongly pro-Empire topic which he treated in an unconventional way.

Michel Ney (1769-1815) was a leading military commander during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was made a Marshal of France by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested, and tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers. He was found guilty, and executed by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815. He refused a blindfold, and was allowed to give the command to fire upon himself.

The Death of Marshal Ney (1868) uses a similar narrative approach to Gérôme’s earlier paintings of the murder of Caesar, in showing moments after the climax of the story. Ney’s body is abandoned, slumped and lifeless on the muddy ground, his top hat apart at the right edge of the canvas. Behind where he stood but a few moments ago there are half a dozen impact marks on the wall, from bullets. The firing squad is being marched off, to the left and into the distance.

Gérôme achieves his narrative using composition, and cues such as the bullet marks, alone. Instead of the tense horror of the shots about to be fired, or being fired, (as used by Manet and Goya, for example), he opts for this cold, bleak, heartless execution, which is grimly effective. He has painted it as nothing less than a street crime, not an act of justice.

Although the graffiti on the wall are hard to read in this image of the painting, both begin with the word VIVE (‘long live’). The first follows that with the word EMPEREUR (emperor), which has been crossed out, and in the second the subsequent word has been erased altogether. The uncertainty in these may refer to Marshal Ney’s enduring loyalty to Napoleon, but his oath of allegiance to the king when the monarchy was restored in 1814.

This painting was exhibited at the Salon in 1868, where it became the centre of attention. As a painting, it appears to have been well-received, but its engagement in politics proved more controversial. The rising tide of Republicanism brought fierce debate over the issues raised.

The Second Empire then entered dark days which led to the disastrous Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Gérôme avoided political controversy during this period with a succession of Orientalist works, many from a visit which he made to Egypt and Palestine in 1868; he also returned as an official observer to the opening of the canal. Being suitably escapist, they proved popular.

As German forces closed on Paris in 1870, Gérôme fled to London, returned to Paris briefly in the autumn/fall, then went back to London. He finally returned to Paris in June 1871, after the suppression of the Paris Commune.

Gérôme had started work on his most famous painting of all, Pollice Verso (1872), before 1869, but had temporarily abandoned it during the Franco-Prussian War. It was not, therefore, intended as comment on that war, nor about France’s sudden transition from Second Empire to Third Republic.

Instead, Gérôme looks at the power of expression – this time, a small gesture of the hand – in his favourite context, the Roman gladiatorial arena, which he had fallen in love with when he was first in Rome in 1843. It also develops a theme from his earlier Ave Caesar: that of spectators and their complicity in the horrific events taking place in front of them.

His earlier paintings of the arena had been somewhat troubled by difficulties in achieving historical accuracy, in armour, weapons, and other details. Far from being a flight of fancy, Gérôme had spent a great deal of time and effort trying to make everything shown in this painting as historically accurate as possible at the time. For the artist, the success of the painting depended on its fine details.

To be able to bring out those fine details, and the thumb gesture which was central to its title and theme, Gérôme had to draw in from the wide-screen spectacle of Ave Caesar, and concentrate on the gladiators, and a small section of the spectators, including the emperor, his court, and those closest to him – a row of six Vestal Virgins, to the right.

The victorious gladiator stands with his right foot on the throat of the loser. He looks up at the crowd, to see whether he should kill that loser, indicated by thumbs pointing downward, or should spare his life, shown by thumbs pointing up. The title confirms what we can see: thumbs are down, and the gladiator on the ground is about to be brutally killed.

Critical commentary became focussed on the row of Vestal Virgins; in Gérôme’s earlier Ave Caesar, they had been sufficiently distant that their expressions and body language couldn’t be read. Here there was no doubt: they were baying for blood, which some critics found frankly revolting. However, it speaks clearly about the Romans’ enjoyment of such events, and a moment’s reflection should make us think more deeply about our own fascination in the suffering of other humans and animals.

This painting was first shown at a private Salon in 1873. Goupil turned it into a highly lucrative series of prints, which sold strongly until well into the twentieth century. For Gérôme it also provided the figures for his first full-scale sculpture The Gladiators, which was a huge success of the Exposition Universelle in 1878, and is now in the Musée d’Orsay.

Pollice Verso had the unintended consequence of making thumbs up and down signs part of the universal non-verbal vocabulary. The Romans did use hand signs involving the thumb to indicate their approval of gladiators killing their losers, but it is now thought that these were rather more complex than those shown by Gérôme. This painting appears to have been responsible (at least in part) for defining the meaning of thumbs-up and thumbs-down gestures in popular communication.

With the days of the Second Empire past, Gérôme now had to paint for the Third Republic, and the many changes which it was to bring to French society – a challenge I will look at in the next article in this series.

References

Ackerman GM (2000) Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Catalogue Raisonné Mis à Jour, (in French) ACR Édition. ISBN 978 2 867 70137 5.
Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds. (2010) Reconsidering Gérôme, Getty. ISBN 978 1 6060 6038 4.
Gülru Çakmak (2017) Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s, Liverpool UP. ISBN 978 1 78694 067 4.
de Cars L et al. (2010) The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Skira. ISBN 978 8 85 720702 5.

Painting in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century was centred on Paris. A lot happened in other countries too – the Pre-Raphaelites for one – but the major movements of the time all came together in the capital city of France. Yet in the middle of this, from 1870-71, there was a major war in northern France between two of the great empires of the day, France and Prussia. Paris was put under siege, fell to Prussian occupation, and was then torn apart by the Commune.

These events had great impact on art and artists at the time. Some fled for safe places: several went to London, which exposed them to important influences such as the paintings of Turner and Constable, who were formative to the Impressionists. Some died during that war, and promising and very influential careers were terminated abruptly. Many stayed, and witnessed the horrors of war at first hand.

In this series of three articles, I look at the Franco-Prussian War, its aftermath, and some of its effects on art and artists.

Like so many wars, the Franco-Prussian War arose because of ambitions by both countries which were in conflict. The French Second Empire under Napoleon III had been in decline for several years, and had already demanded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the left bank of the Rhine in ‘compensation’ for Prussia’s annexation of territories to form the North German Confederation. Prussia was clearly seeking to become the dominant power in Europe, by forming a single nation from those previously separate states, plus the Southern German States and the French territory of Alsace-Lorraine.

France and Prussia were on a collision course, and on 19 July 1870 France declared war on the North German Confederation – a war for which it was almost completely unprepared.

Fleury Chenu’s father in Briançon, France, was a master tailor working for the French Sixth Regiment at the time. Chenu’s Trainees, Snow Effect from 1870 gives a good idea of the very limited preparation which the French had made as tensions mounted during the previous winter. Although a detailed realist painting, Chenu’s sky is so powerful, and sets the scene for the straggling trainees as they make their way along the icy road.

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot had become an officer in the French infantry in 1866, and at the time of the war was a Lieutenant in the 23rd Infantry. He must have known how numerically inferior and weak the French forces were when he painted these Reservists (1870) queueing in the heavy showers to enlist and serve their country. The French mobilisation occurred before reforms had been implemented to the system, and proved chaotic and inadequate.

Jeanniot was wounded at Rezonville, was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his service during the war, and eventually left the army in the rank of Major.

Napoleon III left Paris for the new headquarters in Metz, as commander of the Army of the Rhine, on 28 July 1870. Although the Prussian army had its own professional General Staff under the command of Field Marshal von Moltke, Adolph von Menzel here shows the ceremonial Departure to the Army of King William I, 31 July 1870 (1871). That same day, Napoleon’s forces moved towards the Saar River to pre-emptively seize the Prussian town of Saarbrücken.

Anton von Werner had been sent with the staff of the Prussian Third Corps under the command of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. When French and Prussian forces fought their first substantial action on 4 August, in the Battle of Wissembourg, the French were soundly defeated and forced to retreat. The commander of the French I Corps was killed, and von Werner committed that to canvas in 1888 as Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm with the Body of General Abel Douay, Weißenburg, 4 August 1870.

This was the first of a series of major defeats for the French during August.

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville made his reputation with a succession of very popular paintings showing the war. The Last Cartridges (1873) shows French snipers from the Blue division of the Marines ambushing Bavarian troops in l’Auberge Bourgerie in Bazeilles just prior to the Battle of Sedan, in which the French suffered their most disastrous defeat to date: on 2 September 1870, Napoleon III himself was forced to surrender with 104,000 of his soldiers.

De Neuville’s The Spy from 1880 shows a scene exploiting the humiliation of the French defeat. As Prussian forces advanced through northern France, they captured and shot good French citizens who they considered had got in their way. The Frenchman in blue to the right of centre is being searched and stripped in front of a group of Prussian officers, clearly accused of trying to defend his own country. Paintings like this fuelled Revanchism, the lasting sense of bitterness and demand for revenge against Prussia – and were disturbingly popular.

De Neuville’s In the Trenches (1874) is perhaps a more faithful depiction of the conditions which French soldiers had to endure as the Prussians took more French territory during the early winter. Members of the Garde Mobile take what shelter they can in the bitter cold.

Paul-Émile Boutigny’s undated Scene from the Franco-Prussian War shows that life was no easier for the better-trained and properly-equipped Prussian forces as the fighting moved into the winter. The two soldiers in the foreground make a fascinating contrast: the officer on the left is wearing modern battle clothing and holding a Dreyse needle-gun, a breech-loading rifle; his colleague on the right wears what is essentially modernised armour with a ‘pickelhaube’ spiked helmet.

Émile Betsellère’s moving L’Oublié! (Forgotten) from 1872 shows the appalling conditions facing the wounded after a winter battle.

Albert Anker was a Swiss artist who you would not have expected to have painted scenes from the Franco-Prussian War. However, in January 1871, he was witness to a strange event which must have affected him deeply. The French General Charles Bourbaki (1816-1897) had been put in command of the Army of the East, soldiers who had been hastily trained and were ill-equipped.

He and his troops were defeated in their attempt to raise the siege of Belfort, and were pursued by the Prussians until they crossed the border into Switzerland in late January and early February. Just over half of his 150,000 men had survived, and were in desperate straits by this time, as the winter conditions worsened. The Swiss disarmed them, gave them as much shelter and aid as they could, as shown in Anker’s painting of Bourbakis from 1871, and returned them to France in March.

Most important of all, though, was the fact that on 19 September 1870, Prussian forces had taken control of the country around Paris, and put the capital under siege.

Following a series of disastrous defeats of the French Army, on 19 September 1870, Prussian forces had taken control of the country around Paris, and put the capital under siege. With the surrender of the French Emperor Napoleon III, a provisional republican government had been established, and ushered in the Third Republic as successor to the Second Empire – in the most difficult of circumstances.

The new French government was not yet ready to admit defeat. They called for guerilla warfare against the occupying Prussian forces to deprive them of supplies, and the formation of large armies from the unoccupied provinces to the west and south. Prussian opinion favoured the bombardment of Paris to try to bring the war to a more rapid conclusion, but thankfully Prussian High Command wouldn’t accept that, on moral grounds.

As the Prussians sent small armies out to the provinces to disrupt French attempts at re-organisation, conditions in Paris grew steadily worse.

Anton von Werner shows the contrasting life In the Troops’ Quarters Outside Paris (1894), here in the luxurious Château de Brunoy, which had been abandoned to or requisitioned by those occupying forces. Prussian soldiers were blamed for the almost complete destruction of Pissarro’s work prior to the war, when they occupied his house in 1870.

Édouard Detaille’s painting of action at Champigny, December 1870 (1879) is only 12.5 km (just under eight miles) from the centre of Paris.

There were French counter-attacks. On 29 October 1870, General Carey de Bellemare attacked the Prussian Guard at Le Bourget, despite having no orders to do so, and forced them to cede the town to his troops. Although the Prussian positions were of little value to either side, the Prussians re-took them in the Battle of Le Bourget on 30 October. Although incorrectly dated, de Neuville shows French soldiers sheltering in a Bivouac after the Battle of Bourget, 21 December 1870 (1873). This was a major blow to the beleaguered citizens still in Paris.

As the winter grew colder, Parisians were starting to starve. A city which had long been proud of its restaurants and food was reduced to scavenging meals based on horse, dog, cat, and even the city’s rats.

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier’s romanticised view of The Siege of Paris from 1870 combines almost every symbol relevant to the city’s distress, dressing Marianne in a lionskin, against a battle-worn flag. Meissonier had originally been attached to the staff of Napoleon III, and accompanied him in early phases of the war in Italy. During the siege of Paris, though, he was a Colonel commanding an improvised infantry unit, and knew well the realities of combat.

Another artist who was trapped within Paris was the great illustrator and painter Gustave Doré, who made several works showing scenes such as this Sister of Charity Saving a Child. An Episode of the Siege of Paris (1870-71).

But the greatest memorial to those who lost their lives in the siege, and those who survived it, is Louis-Ernest Barrias’ bronze The Defence of Paris of 1883. This has so dominated the part of the city in which it is situated that the area is known as La Défense.

Military action continued into 1871, although it was already clear that France was thoroughly defeated. Secret discussions about an armistice started on 23 January, but the French government feared that their capitulation could precipitate rebellion, even revolution.

Édouard Detaille’s depiction of The Armistice of 28th January 1871 (1873) shows the moment that the symbolic white flag was raised, over a bleak plain.

To the nearly 400,000 French dead from the war, the Prussians were determined to add profound insult: as shown in Anton von Werner’s painting of the Crowning of Wilhelm I as Emperor of Germany, in Versailles (1882), Prussia had celebrated victory and transformed into Germany in this ceremony held at the most famous of French royal palaces, on 18 January 1871.

Neither were the participants afraid to spread ‘false news’: Emil Hünten’s undated Welcome of Empress Eugénie by Prussian Soldiers shows an event which never occurred. When the Empress was told of her husband’s surrender to the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan, she is reported to have said:
“No! An Emperor does not capitulate! He is dead!… They are trying to hide it from me. Why didn’t he kill himself! Doesn’t he know he has dishonored himself?!”

With hostile crowds forming outside her Tuileries Palace, she slipped out to find sanctuary in the company of her American dentist, then fled to England by yacht on 7 September 1870. She was later joined by the former emperor, and the couple lived at Chislehurst in Kent. She never fraternised with Prussian soldiers.

The Franco-Prussian War was over, but its effects on Paris were not yet complete.

The provisional French government had been very circumspect about capitulating at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in late January 1871, because of their fears of insurrection. The dangers of this were greatest in Paris, where those defending the city had necessarily acted independently of the rest of France throughout the siege. Cracks started to appear soon after the armistice came into effect, and by the eighteenth of March, Paris was under the rule of its own revolutionary government.

The Commune ran Paris for two months before the French government sent the army, drawn almost entirely from the provinces, to suppress it. In the week that followed 21 May 1871, the city was again engulfed in war. Several major public buildings, including the Tuileries Palace and City Hall (the Hotel de Ville), were destroyed, many more were badly damaged, more than seven thousand died, and over fifteen thousand were brought to trial for offences committed during the Commune.

Although only a boy at the time, Maximilien Luce must have retained vivid memories of the Paris Commune, which he finally committed to paint in his A Street in Paris in May 1871 (also known as The Commune) in 1903-6.

Édouard Manet was nearly forty, and his vivid sketch of The Barricade (Civil War) (1871) shows a firing squad shooting a couple of Communards at very close range.

Eugène Varlin was a political activist who had started his career as a bookbinder, and become a socialist revolutionary and pioneer trade unionist. During the seige of Paris, he had distributed aid from his co-operative restaurant.

In March 1871, he took part in the storming of the Place Vendôme, following which he was elected to the Council of the Paris Commune. In ‘Bloody Week’ in May, he fought against government troops. When the Commune had been suppressed and broken, he was captured, taken to Montmartre, tortured and blinded by a mob, and finally shot on 28 May.

Maximilien Luce painted this in The Execution of Varlin (1914-17).

Other painters used historical metaphor.

Édouard Debat-Ponsan’s One Morning in Front of the Louvre Gate (1880) shows Catherine de’ Medici (in black) gazing impassively at the bodies of French Protestants who had been slaughtered in the massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1572. King Charles IX of France is said to have ordered this massacre, at least partly under the influence of Catherine, his mother, allegedly in fear of a (Protestant) Huguenot uprising. The reading of Debat-Ponsan’s painting relies on the massacre of the Communards for context.

With most of Alsace and the Moselle department of Lorraine annexed by the new German Empire as part of the reparations of defeat, tens of thousands of French refugees were on the move back to the safety of French territory.

This is shown in Louis-Frederic Schützenberger’s Exodus (Alsatian Family Abandons the Country) of 1872, now on display in Mulhouse, which became German in 1871, and was restored to France following the First World War in 1919.

The most obvious effect of the war on art was the loss of two of France’s leading young painters.

Henri Regnault had won the Prix de Rome at the start of his career, and had already become one of its leading history and narrative painters when war broke out. On 19 January 1871, during the second Battle of Buzenval, near St Cloud to the west of the city of Paris, Regnault was among the defenders who was killed. He was 27.

Carolus-Duran, John Singer Sargent’s influential teacher, had served alongside Regnault, and later in the year painted this oil sketch of Henri Regnault Dead on the Battlefield (1871).

Frédéric Bazille was the most promising figurative painter among the Impressionists, and his work was already starting to have impact on painting well beyond that circle of friends. Within a month of the start of the war, Bazille had enlisted in the Third Zouave Regiment. He spent September training with the regiment in Algeria, then returned to fight in France. On 28 November 1870, Bazille was killed at the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande. He would have celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday just over a week later.

Immediately before he joined up, Bazille had been working on three paintings while he was staying at Méric, alone. Study for a Young Male Nude was being painted over an unfinished painting of two women in a garden, and the lower third of the canvas shows the lower part of their dresses.

Paul Cézanne fled Paris for L’Estaque; Jean-Léon Gérôme and several of the Impressionists fled to London; Ernest Meissonier and Édouard Manet served together in the defence of Paris; Rosa Bonheur, the famous animal painter, joined the local militia and even fired on a Prussian camp.

Charles Daubigny took his family to London, where he introduced Monet and Pissarro to Paul Durand-Ruel, who was Daubigny’s dealer and had just opened a gallery in London. Daubigny co-arranged in London an exhibition of paintings which included some of Monet’s. These relationships with Durand-Ruel were to prove decisive in Monet’s and Pissarro’s careers. In 1871, Daubigny exhibited nine paintings at the International Exhibition in London, following which he and his family returned to France.

When Monet and his family were in London, he saw the works of Constable and Turner, which were a significant influence over the subsequent development of his style, and what we now consider to be Impressionism. Monet submitted paintings for the Royal Academy exhibition in early 1871, but they were refused.

Camille Pissarro lived with his family in Norwood, then a village outside London, returning to France the following year to discover that Prussian troops had destroyed almost all his works, which he had left behind in his house.

During the war, Odilon Redon served as a private soldier in the Loire. Once the Paris Commune had been suppressed in 1871, he returned to the capital, where he was welcomed into literary and artistic circles.

Berthe Morisot stayed with her family in Paris during its long and bitter siege, and remained there during the Commune too. Like many others who were there, her health suffered; friends remarked that she appeared to age prematurely as a result, which may have accounted for her early death.

Gustave Doré had a very personal involvement, as he had been born in Strasbourg, a French city which the Prussians had taken early in the war. He volunteered to serve in the National Guard, and produced several moving paintings of the suffering of Paris.

His The Enigma (souvenirs de 1870) and two other works were painted using grisaille, greys normally used to model tones in traditional layered technique. This shows the shattered and still-burning remains of the city in the background, bodies of some of the Prussian artillery in the foreground, and two mythical beasts silhouetted in an embrace.

The winged creature is female, and probably represents France, who clasps the head of a sphinx, who personifies the forces which determine victory or defeat. The enigmatic question would then relate to the Franco-Prussian War, and the reasons for France’s defeat.

The war and its aftermath caused many artists to question the identity of France, and the meaning of Frenchness. Some of the most thoughtful paintings which address those issues are those of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

The role of balloons during the siege of Paris was the inspiration for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ The Balloon of 1870, which became popular as a lithograph made by Émile Vernier. The following year, Puvis de Chavannes painted a pendant The Pigeon, which showed another means of communication used during the siege.

A woman seen almost in silhouette waves at one of the balloons bearing news, as it flies near Mount Valérien. In her right hand she holds a musket, symbolic of the arming of the people of Paris at the time. The same woman appears in mourning in The Pigeon, collecting a carrier pigeon which had flown through the predatory hawks flown by the Prussians.

The pair of paintings meant a great deal to Puvis de Chavannes, who reluctantly gave them to the government a few years later, to be prizes in a lottery organised to provide aid to the survivors of the great fire of Chicago in 1871. They didn’t return to Paris until 1987, and are now in the Musée d’Orsay.

Puvis de Chavannes’ Hope from 1872 develops the post-war theme further, and was exhibited at the Salon in 1872, the first following the war. A young woman sits amid a landscape which has been destroyed by fighting. The bleached rubble of a farmhouse is seen in the right distance, and there are two improvised graveyards with clusters of crosses. She holds a sprig of oak as a symbol of the recovery of the nation.

Puvis de Chavannes’ paintings provoked reflection rather than taking sides, and became popular across the range of public opinion. Some artists were stuck in revanchism, though, playing on the same feelings of patriotism which had taken France and Prussia into the war – like Édouard Detaille’s Le Rêve (The Dream) (1888).

Rather than showing military action from the war, Detaille here makes a direct political statement. Showing a group of young conscripts just before reveille, when on exercise probably in Champaign, he paints their (imaginary) collective dream of previous battles, spread across the coloured clouds of the dawn sky.

This ‘flashback’ technique sided with the rising militarism and thirst for righting the wrongs which the Franco-Prussian War had done France, and the following year conscription was introduced. The painting was awarded a medal, was bought by the French state, and presented at the 1889 World Fair. Its huge canvas is now one of the less popular works on display in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

One painter with a particular problem was James (Jacques Joseph) Tissot. He had served in the National Guard during the defence of Paris, following which he may have become involved in the Commune, perhaps to protect his own property. When the Commune was suppressed, Tissot was forced to flee to London for his own safety. On arriving there in June 1871, he had just a hundred francs to his name.

One way or another, there was hardly a painter in France at the time whose life and work was not dramatically affected by the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath.

After Jacopo Tintoretto had completed his series of paintings showing the Fables of Ovid in the palace at San Paternian, he turned to what was to be his mainstay throughout his career: religious scenes for the churches and other institutions in the city of Venice. At first the works were relatively minor, but in 1548 he completed his first major commission for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, marking a turning point in his career.

Over this period, Tintoretto worked with Andrea Schiavone (c 1510/15-1563), who was slightly older than him and an important early influence. Tintoretto was quite traditional in his style, a note above his studio door proclaiming that he drew like Michelangelo and used colour like Titian, who was the dominant and most popular painter in Venice at the time.

The Supper at Emmaus (E&I 27) from about 1542 shows a popular scene from the gospel of Saint Luke, in which the resurrected Christ met two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus. The disciples urged him to stay and have supper with them, and when the bread was broken, they recognised him as the risen Christ.

Tintoretto uses a formal arrangement of the table, with Christ sat in the middle, directly underneath a pillar marking the midline of the canvas, and the two disciples sat nearer the viewer, to each side. To this, he adds a woman and man serving the meal, and another couple of extras to turn the simple meal into a more substantial gathering. There is even a cat sat watching from the lower left foreground.

A chequered floor adds depth by perspective, and there are diagonals formed by the walking sticks of the two disciples, which give a narrative link to their recent journey to Emmaus. Tintoretto places a glass goblet on the table to demonstrate his skills at rendering it.

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (E&I 31) from about 1543 shows an episode from the early life of Jesus, when he was presented to the Temple in Jerusalem to formally mark his induction into the Jewish faith, an event commemorated as a feast by most Christian churches and denominations. The infant Christ is being passed across from his mother, the Virgin Mary, to a priest, in front of a large crowd. In the foreground another mother is feeding her own baby.

This very traditional if not archaic depiction was an early commission by the Scuola (trade guild) of fishmongers for the church of Santa Maria del Carmini, Venice.

In about 1544, Tintoretto tackled one of the best-known stories from the Acts of the Apostles, which has been painted extensively but poses a difficult problem in composition which few artists have solved particularly well: The Conversion of Saint Paul (E&I 32).

Paul, then known as Saul, had been a pharisee who devoted his energy to the persecution of Christians. When travelling from Jerusalem to Damascus with the intention of arresting Christians there, he underwent a visionary experience in which the voice of Jesus asked him why he was persecuting him. Paul was blinded for three days as a result, his sight being restored by Ananias in Damascus, and he was converted to Christianity.

Tintoretto’s account is very Renaissance in its style, but with some unconventional touches. Its overwhelming effect is of the chaos which Paul’s vision causes, with riders dismounted, horses plunging into the river, and tumbling down long flights of steps. It may employ multiplex narrative, there being at least two white horses with blue saddles, with riders in yellow tunics. That at the left is probably intended to represent Paul during his vision, with the voice of Christ coming from the top left.

Tintoretto developed the simple motif from his earlier painting of the Ovidian myth of Apollo and Marsyas, in his Fables of Ovid series, in the Contest of Apollo and Marsyas (E&I 34) from 1544-45. The previous motif is reiterated at the left, with the addition of a small audience consisting of a token Grace, as judge, and three men. He keeps to the more gentle start to the story, and makes no reference to its gory conclusion, in which Marsyas inevitably loses and is flayed alive at the behest of Apollo.

This painting was commissioned in 1544 by Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), a major literary figure of the time and close friend of Tintoretto’s rival Titian, as a ceiling panel for his Palazzo Bollani on the Grand Canal. Aretino was a successful satirist and early writer of pornography, who later became a successful blackmailer.

Tintoretto’s sketchy brushwork is quite noticeable here, and the style close to that of Andrea Schiavone. Aretino’s letter of thanks to the painter compliments him on his speed of execution.

Tintoretto turned to Greek mythology in his Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan (E&I 36) painted in about 1545, although this time his reference is Homer’s Odyssey.

Venus (the Greek Aphrodite) is the unfaithful wife of Vulcan (Hephaestus). On one occasion, she had an affair with Mars (Ares), and was discovered by her husband in the midst of their lovemaking, who promptly threw a fine but unbreakable net over the couple, and summoned the other gods to witness their shame.

Tintoretto offers an unusual interpretation of this: Vulcan is inspecting his wife, as Mars cowers under the bed at the right. A small dog is drawing attention to Mars’ hiding place, and Venus’ child, Cupid, rests in a cradle behind them.

Within this is skilful mirror-play: the circular mirror behind the bed reflects an image of Vulcan leaning over Venus. The artist also shows off his technique in other ways, in a glass jar on the window sill at the upper right, and optical effects in the window glass.

In about 1546, Tintoretto painted a series showing the seasons, of which three works now survive.

Summer (E&I 40) shows a reclining Titian nude before she has removed her clothes, with the summer harvest ripening behind her. She is joined by three birds, one an exotic parrot, flowers of the dog rose, and hanging bunches of grapes.

The Last Supper (E&I 44) from 1547 is one of the first of Tintoretto’s succession of paintings showing the last meal of Jesus and his disciples prior to his crucifixion. Although a modest version, it contains some delightful and quite innovative features, such as the broken rhythm of the wooden stools at the front.

Their forms are derived from Venetian Gothic architecture which surrounded the artist throughout his life, and are echoed in the feet of Judas, who is holding his bag of silver behind him, and of the other disciple with his back to the viewer. This was commissioned by the Scuola del Sacramento of San Marcuola, the group responsible for looking after the sacrament during periods between masses at that church.

The painting which marked a turning point in Tintoretto’s career is his Miracle of the Slave (E&I 46) from 1548. Based on the notoriously unreliable Golden Legend, a slave is about to be martyred by torture in having his limbs and body broken, for the offence of venerating the relics of a Christian saint.

The naked slave is lying on the ground, surrounded by the shattered fragments of an axe, other tools, and lengths of rope which were being used to kill him slowly. One of his torturers, wearing a distinctive turban, is caught just to the right of centre, in the midst of hammering something to inflict more pain and suffering.

Surrounding the slave is a tight cluster of people: his torturers, bystanders, several women and their children. Flying above them all, into the picture plane, his right arm stretched down towards the chaos, is the foreshortened figure of Saint Mark.

This seems to have been Tintoretto’s first really large-scale work, which brought him renown throughout Venice. His composition was inspired by a bronze relief of the same scene by Jacopo Sansovino, made in 1541-44. Commissioned for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, it proved controversial and was initially returned to the artist as being unsuitable. It marked the start of a long and very beneficial relationship with the Scuola, and Tintoretto’s promotion to the major league of Venetian artists.

References

Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman (2009) Toward a new Tintoretto Catalogue, with a Checklist of revised Attributions and a new Chronology, in Falomir op cit.
Miguel Falomir (ed) (2009) Jacopo Tintoretto, Proceedings of the International Symposium, Museo Nacional del Prado. ISBN 978 84 8480 171 9.
Roland Krischel (ed) (2017) Tintoretto, A Star was Born, Hirmer (in German). ISBN 978 3 777 42942 7.
Tom Nichols (2015) Tintoretto, Tradition and Identity, 2nd edition, Reaktion Books. ISBN 978 1 78023 450 2.

For Gérôme, the Third Republic brought new challenges to which he had to rise. He had found favour with Napoleon III and his court, and had received Imperial commissions. His history paintings of Napoleon Bonaparte from the mid-1860s would hardly do well with the Emperor and Empress in exile in Britain, and the French nation shocked by defeat, and divided in its reactions.

Perhaps feeling that the sixteenth century was safer ground, Gérôme captured two great French playwrights apparently working together in A Collaboration – Corneille and Molière of 1873.

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), universally known by his stage name of Molière, was without doubt France’s greatest comic playwright of the era, and is shown here at the left. Pierre Corneille (1606-84), seen at the right, was the greatest tragic playwright of the era. What better combination could there have been for French theatre?

This proved to be more than just a hypothetical question in 1919, when it was first seriously proposed that some, or many, of Molière’s plays had in fact been written, or ghost-written, by Corneille, a controversy which still smoulders on. The two playwrights did in fact meet, possibly in this way, when they collaborated with Philippe Quinault in the writing of Psyché in 1671.

For Gérôme, this may have been a public expression of his desire to bury the hatchet, and for Republicans and their opponents to get on with rebuilding the nation together. This was exhibited at the Salon in 1874, from where it was sold to a New York collector for 30,000 francs.

Accompanying this was this intricate painting of L’Éminence Grise, Le Père Joseph (1873), the shadowy figure who was the right-hand man of the notorious Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), who had been King Louis XIII’s First Minister of State from 1624. François Leclerc du Tremblay (1577-1638), known ever since as the Éminence Grise from his grey friar’s robes, had been a Capuchin friar when he first met Richelieu, and the two became very close. Père Joseph often acted as the Cardinal’s diplomatic representative, and even became war minister.

Gérôme was astute in this choice of subject, given the strong anti-clericalism of the Third Republic, and the distrust of ruling cliques, particularly those based in the Catholic church. But, as ever, there is more to this painting than its superficial story: Gérôme shows a dazzling display of finely-dressed nobles bowing deeply at the sombrely-dressed Père Joseph, whose head is buried deep in a book. This is again about signs and appearance.

This painting was sold to a New York collector shortly after completion, and exhibited at the Salon the following year, and again at the Exposition Universelle in 1878.

The following year, Gérôme again refused to be drawn into painting recent history in France, opting for two historical portraits of fascinating relevance. Markos Botsaris (1874) had been a great Greek general in the early quarter of the nineteenth century, and lived between about 1788-1823. He had been the main military leader of the Greek War of Independence from 1821-23, and remains a revered figure in modern Greece. He died when shot in the head during the Battle of Missolonghi.

Gérôme’s portrait shows a brooding figure in Orientalist dress, slumped deep in his ornate chair, bristling with knives, swords, and weapons, longing for his country’s freedom from the Ottoman Empire.

Saint Jerome (1874) stands in complete contrast: the ascetic saint is seen during one of his sojourns in the desert, almost naked, asleep on a lion, one of his better-known attributes. Over on a rock table is Jerome’s translation of the Bible, which he made between 392-405. For someone who so seldom painted religious works, this is an interesting excursion.

This painting had apparently been lost for many years, until its recent rediscovery: it was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, but seems to have vanished a few years later, and wasn’t rediscovered until 2011, when the Städel Museum in Frankfurt came across it in its store!

Gérôme had not forsaken the spectacle of the Roman arena. Circus Maximus (1876) is his recreation of four-horse chariot racing taking place in the largest of all the stadiums in the city, capable of holding a crowd of over 150,000. Now a public park, in its heyday its oval track was about a mile in length. But the great strengths of Gérôme’s previous paintings – their widescreen illusion, the shocking gore in the arena itself, and the spectators baying for blood – were lost in this painting, and I find it one of Gérôme’s few works which leaves me cold.

In spite of this, Goupil had no difficulty selling this work almost immediately on completion, to a New York collector, for 125,000 francs.

Gérôme returned to French history of two centuries before in one of his most elaborately-detailed and almost hyperreal works, Reception of Le Grand Condé by Louis XIV at Versailles in 1674 (1878). Louis de Bourbon (1621-1686) was a notable French general and noble, representative of the Condé branch of the royal House of Bourbon, who was a distinguished leader of the French army during the Thirty Years’ War.

By 1650, the Grand Condé had fallen out of favour at court, and with the Regent Anne of Austria in particular, who had him arrested early that year for participation in the Fronde civil wars. He was pardoned in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, which formally ended the Franco-Spanish War, and accepted the authority of King Louis XIV.

On returning from exile, the Grand Condé was received by the king at Versailles in 1674, following his military victory at the Battle of Seneffe against William of Orange. Here the Grand Condé is slowly ascending the steps between laurel wreaths of victory, and captured enemy standards at the edges, bowing with respect at the king before him.

According to Gérôme’s note to the American collector William H Vanderbilt who bought this work, the Grande Condé then said: “Sire, I beg your majesty’s pardon for making him wait so long,” to which the king replied “My cousin, do not hurry. When you are laden with so many laurels, it is difficult to walk fast.”

This may appear an odd subject for a painting eight years into the new republic, and more than a little revanchist in its reference to previous military victory over William of Orange. But I think it was a grand piece of escapism, which was very different from the remaining three paintings from this period.

Solomon’s Wall, Jerusalem (1869) is the first of two paintings which are often considered to be stock Orientalist views. This wall purported to have been built around the city of Jerusalem by King Solomon between 1000-900 BCE is now most strongly associated with places in which Jews have traditionally gathered to lament the destruction of the Temples.

This version, painted shortly before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Second Empire, shows a small scatter of people in different dress weeping at the foot of the wall’s massive limestone blocks.

Eight years later, post-war and well into the Third Republic, Gérôme painted The Wailing Wall (Solomon’s Wall) (1877), which I think the more moving for its simplicity of motif. Was France perhaps now at its own wailing wall?

In the late 1870s, Gérôme concentrated on Orientalist views, and relatively narrative-free works derived from them. He hadn’t abandoned his Roman project, nor had he lost his interest in the metanarrative of paintings. And his first narrative work of the 1880s showed there was more to come.

Cave Canem (meaning ‘beware of the dog’), sometimes called War Prisoner in Rome, from 1881, is little-known among his works today. Its conventional narrative is quite simple too: a prisoner of war in Rome, during reconstructed classical times (as shown in the glimpse at the left edge) sits chained up outside a stone dog kennel. He has a large water-bowl of the kind which might be placed by a dog, some onions or garlic, and a chunk of bread.

Oddly, though, the prisoner appears well-muscled and in good health, not neglected or starving. Neither is this an image of spectacle destined for lucrative prints, but appears much more personal in its motivation. Gérôme gave this work to his home town of Vesoul, in eastern France.

Is this prisoner not France, in chains following the war, treated like a dog, with the traditional but ominous warning above? Or could he be the artist himself, perhaps?

References

Ackerman GM (2000) Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Catalogue Raisonné Mis à Jour, (in French) ACR Édition. ISBN 978 2 867 70137 5.
Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds. (2010) Reconsidering Gérôme, Getty. ISBN 978 1 6060 6038 4.
Gülru Çakmak (2017) Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s, Liverpool UP. ISBN 978 1 78694 067 4.
de Cars L et al. (2010) The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Skira. ISBN 978 8 85 720702 5.

In 1548, with his Miracle of the Slave (E&I 46) (discussed in my previous article), Tintoretto had made a success of his first really large-scale commission, bringing him renown throughout Venice.

Before I move on to look at his subsequent religious and narrative paintings, there are three slightly earlier works I’d like to look at briefly.

Allegory of the Dreams of Men (E&I 38) from about 1546 is little-known, but belonging to the Detroit Institute of Arts is accessible to many in North America. It was apparently commissioned for the ceiling of a bedroom in the Casa Barbo, in Venice, where it must have looked really splendid.

It incorporates a rich variety of symbols from astrology, arranged in a near-symmetrical fashion around its central figure. Against a background of signs of the Zodiac, there’s a decorated crescent moon, gold coins pouring from the clouds, and a minor pantheon of foreshortened figures. At the foot is Father Time with his sandglass, and each of the other figures appears to merit careful iconographic study.

Tintoretto also painted many portraits, which I can only dip into occasionally, or this series would last until the end of the year. I have selected two which I find of particular interest at this stage in his career.

This Portrait of Jacopo Sansovino was painted before 1546, is a good example of his portraiture work, and bears a significant inscription. Sansovino (1486-1570) was a major sculptor and architect of the day, best-known for his buildings around the Piazza San Marco, which are so distinctive of Venice.

This shows him as a young man; Tintoretto also painted him when he was visibly much older. The artist signs himself in the inscription ‘Jacobus Tintorettus his greatest friend’.

Tintoretto also painted his Self-Portrait in about 1547, looking young, wide-eyed, and intense.

Within a year of completing the huge Miracle of the Slave, Tintoretto painted the large Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet (E&I 47) for the Scuola di San Marcuola, now in the Prado. This painting has been analysed extensively, and its carefully-projected buildings and table reconstructed by Ana González Mozo.

The disciples are gathered in a palatial room, around a large refectory table which looks appropriate for the Last Supper, an event which appears to be depicted in a painting hanging on the wall. In the right foreground, Jesus Christ is washing the feet of those disciples one by one, with them standing in turn in a shallow wooden tub. Elsewhere, disciples are seen pulling one another’s boots off, and a hound sits alert in the centre foreground.

Venice was particularly prone to outbreaks of plague, and developed procedures and establishments for coping with cases. In his large canvas showing Saint Roch Heals Plague Victims (E&I 50) from 1549, Tintoretto shows those suffering from plague brought to a small chapel, where the saint is healing them. The dark room is already collecting a disarray of bodies, some seemingly close to death. Without the miraculous work of the saint, this would quickly have become the waiting room for hell. This work was painted for Saint Roch’s church, the Chiesa di San Rocco, in Venice.

Later in his career, stock motifs such as the Assumption of the Virgin (E&I 53) would have been left largely to his workshop, but this example from the early 1550s, for San Stin in Venice, is thought to have been executed by Tintoretto himself. Although it looks to have been painted at speed (as he was reputed), the Virgin Mary’s body language and expression have a presence about them, and many of the figures appear intriguing.

Between 1550 and 1553, Tintoretto painted four works for the Scuola della Trinità showing scenes from the early chapters of the book of Genesis, of which I here show the three which are now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. The fourth, showing Adam and Eve before God, is now in the Uffizi in Florence.

In Creation of the Animals (E&I 55), the first of the cycle, God flies along as he is creating pairs of different species of bird, fish, and animal, from cormorants to rabbits. His use of colour for the garments of God and near-monochrome for the creatures, coupled with strong design, result in an image which is almost a forerunner of the more graphic works of William Blake.

The Temptation of Adam and Eve (E&I 57) is also a strong design, but one in which the viewer almost joins Adam in seeing Eve’s nakedness, and the tempting apple being proferred in her hand. This is a theme which he was to return to in Susannah and the Elders, very shortly (and covered in the next article).

The last of the four, showing Cain Killing Abel (E&I 58), has the two brothers embroiled in a fight, with Cain’s right hand raised, about to bring a knife down into Abel’s body.

At about this time (1552), Tintoretto completed three religious paintings for the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, which were to lead on to an early masterpiece: Saint George and the Dragon (c 1553), which I examine in the next article.

References

Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman (2009) Toward a new Tintoretto Catalogue, with a Checklist of revised Attributions and a new Chronology, in Falomir op cit.
Miguel Falomir (ed) (2009) Jacopo Tintoretto, Proceedings of the International Symposium, Museo Nacional del Prado. ISBN 978 84 8480 171 9.
Roland Krischel (ed) (2017) Tintoretto, A Star was Born, Hirmer (in German). ISBN 978 3 777 42942 7.
Tom Nichols (2015) Tintoretto, Tradition and Identity, 2nd edition, Reaktion Books. ISBN 978 1 78023 450 2.

The first decade of the Third Republic had been a stormy period in France, and by the 1880s the old guard royalists were in decline, and the civic powers of the Republic were expanding to include the provision of free secular education. With Paris well into the Belle Époque, artists divided between those who painted the belles, and those who painted the poor. Jean-Léon Gérôme did neither, preferring instead to tell the story of the stock market crash which forced Paul Gauguin to paint for his living.

The Paris economy and stock market had been generally reckless during the Second Empire, as told so well in the novels of Émile Zola. The Third Republic did little to change that, and during 1880 the market for new securities and forward markets boomed as investors gambled on stock prices continuing to rise. In early 1881, the Union Générale bank fell into difficulties: its stock prices suddenly fell, it was unable to cover its debts, and its public reports were falsified to try to disguise its predicament.

The bank crashed, bringing down with it the entire stock market, leading to the worst crisis in the French economy in the century, and a recession lasting until the end of the decade. Among the many stockbrokers who lost their job was Paul Gauguin.

Recognising the impossibility of painting an economic crisis, Gérôme turned to similar but more visual events of the past, in The Tulip Folly (1882).

The tulip flower, originally a Turkish import, became extremely popular in the Netherlands during the early 1600s. The Dutch cultivated them to produce varieties of different colours, petal and leaf patterns, and these became associated with wealth and status.

By 1634, the value of tulips had become very high, out of all proportion to their real worth. Certain varieties in particular became highly sought-after, and the subject of financial speculation. Eventually the bubble burst, prices collapsed, and paper fortunes vanished almost overnight. This resulted in a credit crisis and national financial problems which were a parallel to those in France at that time.

Gérôme shows one group of (government) soldiers in the middle distance, destroying beds of tulips in a move to manipulate the market. In the foreground, an officer stands guard over a pot containing a single rare variety of tulip. His sword is drawn ready, although pointing at the ground just by his valuable plant.

There is another reading which may not have been Gérôme’s: prices of his paintings had become almost absurdly high. When this work was sold to New York within months of completion, it fetched 50,000 francs, for example. He may well have foreseen the crash in value which would result when his work fell out of fashion, as it did towards the end of the nineteenth century. This could even have been his warning to speculators that he felt his work had become overvalued.

The following year, Gérôme finally delivered a painting which had been commissioned by the American collector William T Walters in 1863, the last of his spectacular depictions of Rome: The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer (1883).

We are back in the Circus Maximus, with the Palatine Hill in the background, although critics have claimed that this looks more like the Colosseum with the Acropolis of Athens behind. The sand in the arena is rutted with the tracks from earlier chariot races. There are nine crucifixes planted at regular intervals around the periphery of the arena; on each, a Christian has been coated with pitch and set alight.

Towards the right, a group of between 40-50 Christian men, women and children are kneeling on the ground, listening to and praying with an elder, who is standing and talking as he looks up to the heavens. To the left, a trapdoor in the arena floor is open and a succession of wild animals are emerging from it into the arena. A large lion is first out and is already heading for the group of people. Still making their way up into the arena are a tiger and another lion.

One other figure is visible, at the left edge: the person who presumably controls the trapdoor, whose head and shoulders stand clear of a heavy stone wall.

Given Gérôme’s earlier efforts to be as historically accurate as possible, this painting is a disappointment. Such martyrdoms by wild beasts and crucifixion did not take place in the Circus Maximus. Given the artist’s record of narrative painting, it is also strange that he should make the figures so distant, and the spectators so remote. As a result, this painting has none of the spectacle, drama, or widescreen effect of his earlier arena scenes. What should have been compelling drama is static and distant.

For his next conventional narrative painting, Gérôme turned to the Old Testament, and a story about King David and the corruption brought by power.

The Biblical story of Bathsheba is one of the more sordid of its histories. King David lusted after Bathsheba, a gentlewoman of fine birth who was married to one of the king’s generals. Having made her pregnant adulterously, David first tried to make it appear that the unborn child had been conceived in wedlock; when that failed he put Bathsheba’s husband into danger in battle, so that he was killed, and David became able to marry her as a widow.

David first developed his lust for Bathsheba when he saw her bathing on the roof of her house, which became a popular motif for paintings, and that chosen by Gérôme for his Bathsheba (1889).

Here is Bathsheba, washing herself, naked in the small garden on her roof. She has her back turned to the viewer, and is washing her left elbow with her right hand. Watching her intently from a balcony up to the left is the figure of David, leaning forward to get as close a look as he can, although it isn’t clear whether he has made eye contact with her. A servant is by Bathsheba’s feet, helping her bathe. Bathsheba’s clothes are piled loosely to her right, on a small stool. Behind them stretches the city, bathed in warm light.

This motif seems to have evolved from several rooftop views among his Orientalist paintings, rather than any historical or personal event.

From the mid-1870s, Gérôme had also been a sculptor, specialising in polychromed marble figures. This led him to paint about sculpture, and to think about visual revelation and truth.

His The End of the Pose (1886) is the first of a series of unusual compound paintings, which are at once self-portraits of Gérôme as a sculptor, studies in the relationship between a model and their sculpted double, and further forays into issues of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth.

Here, while Gérôme cleans up, his model is seen covering up her sculpted double with sheets, as she remains completely naked. Apart from various diversionary entertainments, including a couple of stuffed birds and a model boat, there is a single red rose on the wooden platform on which the model and statue stand. Presumably this is a symbol of thanks from the artist to his model.

It is not far from here to the myth of the perfect sculptor, Pygmalion, whose creation was given life, turning statue into lover, which was Gérôme’s next step in 1890.

This study for Pygmalion and Galatea from 1890 was an early attempt at the composition, in which Pygmalion’s future bride is still a marble statue at her feet, but very much flesh and blood from the waist up. That visual device was perfect, but Gérôme recognised that his painting would be shunned because of its full-frontal nudity, so reversed the view.

Gérôme’s finished Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890) extends the marble effect a little higher, and by showing Galatea’s buttocks and back and concealing the kiss, it stayed on the right side of what in the day was deemed decent. His attention to detail is, as always, delightful, with two masks against the wall at the right, Cupid ready with his bow and arrow, an Aegis bearing the head of Medusa, and a couple of statues about looking and seeing.

The Conspirators from 1892 is another of Gérôme’s little-known paintings, and it is not clear how he arrived at this motif. There had certainly been no shortage of political conspiracies in France at this time, and in 1892 the Panama Canal Scandal was often in the headlines, and may have been the germ for the motif.

Three men are in a huddle around a table at one end of an otherwise almost empty room. Lit by an unseen lamp between them, they are discussing something very secret. One hat hangs high on the wall at the right, and some other clothes are visible on a long bench which runs along the facing wall. There is another, empty chair in the middle of the room.

In the final decade of his career, as he watched his popularity decline, Gérôme was to think, paint and write more about seeing the truth.

References

Ackerman GM (2000) Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Catalogue Raisonné Mis à Jour, (in French) ACR Édition. ISBN 978 2 867 70137 5.
Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds. (2010) Reconsidering Gérôme, Getty. ISBN 978 1 6060 6038 4.
Gülru Çakmak (2017) Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s, Liverpool UP. ISBN 978 1 78694 067 4.
de Cars L et al. (2010) The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Skira. ISBN 978 8 85 720702 5.