In this third and final instalment of this series looking at paintings telling the story of Susanna and the Elders, from the Old Testament book of Daniel, I have reached the nineteenth century, a period when narrative painting allegedly fell into crisis. If this evidence is anything to go by, it appears to have been both innovative and successful.
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One of his most important early paintings, Théodore Chassériau’s account from 1839 combines a delicate figure study of Susanna, with a condemnatory interpretation of the voyeurs behind. She stands unaware of the unwelcome voyeurs behind her, just as in Tintoretto’s painting, looking dreamily into the distance. Beside her, on the bank of the small pool, are her clothes and jewellery. Watching her from a bank behind are two younger men, one of whom is staring straight at her back, with wide eyes. The other appears more detached and less obsessed with her figure.
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Shortly before Chassériau’s health collapsed and he died in 1856 at the age of only 37, he painted another version, in which the elders are propositioning Susanna. He uses a more traditional composition, with Susanna covering herself, shrinking back from their advances, and defying them. The elders aren’t quite touching her yet, but edging far too close.
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Although better known for his landscape paintings, Eugène Lepoittevin tried modernising some traditional narratives, including Susanna and the elders in about 1865. Set somewhere deep in rural France, Susanna is about to bathe in a rather dirty pond, and lives in the ramshackle cottage behind. The elders are barely hidden from her sight. This might have been intended as an elaborate caricature of the original story.
At the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries two German artists came to paint Susanna and her story repeatedly: Franz von Stuck and Lovis Corinth. In both cases, she was part of their obsession with the femme fatale, in a curious reversal of her story.
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In von Stuck’s Susanna Bathing from 1904, he shows Susanna full-length, naked apart from elaborate ear-rings, with the two elders propositioning her from behind a low wall.
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In his 1913 version, sometimes named Susanna I, her face is turned away from the viewer, as she looks at the two elders who are watching her. With her face averted from the viewer, von Stuck weakens his statement of her anguish and embarrassment.
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This second version from 1913 follows the traditional account more faithfully, but uses a visual joke to make the elders look even more ridiculous: the small stream of water emerging from the orifice set in the wall of the pool is readily misinterpreted as a stream of urine passed by the elder dressed in red.
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Lovis Corinth started painting this story in 1890, when he made two slightly different versions of what was fundamentally the same work, shown above and below. The only reference to the garden is now a single rose, the flower chosen by Tintoretto for the trellis in front of Susanna, on the floor. The two elders have followed Susanna back inside after her bathing, and are now spying on her from behind a curtain, where only one of them is prominent. In common with Tintoretto, Corinth chooses a moment before Susanna is aware that she is being watched, and long before the elders force themselves on her. Both paintings emphasise her nakedness by including her clothes, and add the jewellery of more traditional depictions.
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Over thirty years later in 1923, a couple of years before his death, Corinth painted his last account of Susanna’s story. He still avoids a pastoral or garden setting, but she has now turned to confront the elders as they try to blackmail her. This has the disadvantage that we cannot see her facial expression, only the leering smiles of the men.
My final painting, and one of the most fascinating of them all, was made by the former Nabi artist Félix Vallotton three years before his death.
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Vallotton’s Chaste Suzanne from 1922 appears to be a modern retelling of this story, showing the two men trying to blackmail Susanna into being unfaithful. By recasting the figures in contemporary dress, Vallotton is perhaps the first to show the modern relevance of the story. Maybe this is the Susanna that we all need to see?