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How Orientalist Painters Die
Mostly
they died in ways like anyone else. The fifty-seven year old Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps, who enthralled Paris audiences with suite of exotic genre and biblical
subjects following a year in Asia Minor in 1829-1830, perished in August 1860
after being thrown by a horse, near his home in the forest of Fontainebleau.1 Léon Belly, whose Pilgrims Going to
Mecca of 1861 remains one of the best-known Orientalist pictures of
the nineteenth century, died in Paris in 1877 after a long and debilitating
illness. The French art world was shaken by the news of this artist cut down at
the age of fifty, but there was nothing Orientalist about the manner of his
death, no reports of dramatic last words or studio deathbed scenes.2 We know even less about how the end came to
Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ, a student of Ingres and best known for
his White Slave of 1888. His death in Paris in 1921 at the age
of eighty-one attracted little attention, silence traceable in large part to a
historic artistic reset that saw so many academic masters of the nineteenth
century fall into obscurity. To repeat, Orientalist painters left the world
under varied circumstances — violent, painful, peaceful, or in ways simply
unknown, in other words just like anyone else. And yet the basic argument of
this essay is that how Orientalists died is not only an empirical but
discursive question. From this latter perspective, their manner of passing
would be mediated across a rich poetics of mortality whose shape and texture
these remarks explore.
Sometimes
an Orientalist simply died a painter’s death. Nothing as emblematic or
status-driven as Raphael dying after painting Christ’s face on his
unfinished Transfiguration, or Leonardo da Vinci dying in the
arms of Francis 1st, to cite two notable deathbed scenes, recounted by Vasari,
that Romantic artists took up with gusto. Nevertheless, examples abound of
nineteenth-century artists who died in a manner that in some measure evoked
their artistic vocation. Take the case of Charles Gleyre, a Swiss painter
working in Paris remembered today mostly for his Lost Illusions of
1843, a talismanic, Orientalizing scene of fatalistic disillusion. Three years
in Greece, Egypt, and Syria in the mid-1830s saw Gleyre nearly succumb both to
fever and severe ophthalmia, including ten months where he lay nearly blind in
the vicinity of Khartoum.3 Gleyre’s experience in the Middle East was
said to have left its mark on the famously grave and taciturn artist. The end,
however, did not come until May 1874, when the sixty-eight year old artist
collapsed while viewing an exhibition in support of the lost provinces of
Alsace and Lorraine, at the Palais Bourbon.
Figure 1. Léon Dussart and Charles
Gleyre, Lost Illusions, 18651867 (reduced replica ofthe 1843 original), oil on
canvas, 34 1/16 x 59 1/4 in. Acquired by William T. Walters, 1867, the Walters
Art Museum, Baltimore.
His
biographer Charles Clément, rushing to Gleyre’s house to view his friend’s
body, noted that his “tired features, so often wracked with pain,” seem
“relaxed.” The painter’s face bore “an extraordinary expression of calm, peace,
and serenity.”4 Note that Clément is anxious to stress the
precise circumstances surrounding Gleyre’s last moments: the exhibition on
behalf of the lost provinces, the gallery where he fell, the fact that he was
accompanied by a student, walking with deference “a few steps behind.” He also
noted the time of day–precisely 11:50, Clément explained, Gleyre arriving in
time still to qualify for half-price admission. Here as elsewhere, the broadly
positivist protocols of nineteenth-century biography did not tolerate the kind
of strategic fictions that populate Vasari’s deathbed scenes. And yet it’s
tempting to treat this recitation of details as embedding a poetics of its own.
The site of Gleyre’s death, to be sure–to drop dead in a museum, surely that is
a painter’s death; note, too, the image of the respectful student following a
few steps behind. And let us not omit the allusion to Gleyre’s
parsimoniousness, which Clément cites to pinpoint the time of death, but which
also serves as ironic counterpoint to the catastrophe shortly to unfold.
Finally note the narrative takes an Orientalist turn, Clément evoking the sense
of serenity on Gleyre’s features following his release. Clément imagines Gleyre
at last free of physical torments that dogged him from his months in Egypt,
torments that nurtured his fatalistic disposition and marked him to the grave.
Eugène
Fromentin did not die an “Orientalist” death either, but as with Gleyre, his
biographers could not resist bringing Fromentin’s experience in North Africa
into play. Fromentin’s Street at Laghouat from the Salon of
1859 emerged as a touchstone of Orientalist art criticism, and to this day his
journals recounting his travels to Algeria stands today as among the most
accomplished examples of the genre. The fifty-six year old Fromentin died in
1876 in his hometown outside La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast. He only
recently had failed (again) to secure a seat at the Institut, although in
literature rather than the section for painters. The prospects of a chair in
painting, Fromentin knew, were slim — a career consisting of genre paintings or
mere tableaux de circonstance would never qualify him for his
profession’s highest honor. Fromentin’s biographers, for their part, evoked a
sense of Orientalist irony. Hence the phrase of Emile Montégut, who cited an
Arab proverb as he spoke of Fromentin succumbing just as he was in the full
maturity of his powers, and on the point of being properly recognized: “When
the house is built, death comes and slams the door,” Montégut observes,
explaining that certainly Fromentin knew this “fatalistic” proverb, in which
seemed “condensed” all the wisdom of the Orient. Surely Fromentin’s “sudden
disappearance,” Montégut adds, so “unexpected,” offered a “lugubrious” and alas
“all too justified” demonstration of the proverb’s veracity.5
The
idea that Fromentin’s death offered an ironic fulfillment of the lessons
learned on his travels to Algeria operates as more than rhetorical conceit. We
find many similar statements across the corpus of Orientalist artistic
biography, as friends and biographers brought to their obituaries and memorial
essays a poetics of endings that entwined art and death along an Orientalist
axis. In some cases critics improvised with a light touch, Montégut’s phrase
about Fromentin offering a case in point. But in other cases the figuration was
more ambitious, encompassing for example a painter’s last words, the manner of
his death, the kind of memorial made for him, or for that matter who turned up
at his funeral. And as the example of Gleyre suggests, the broadly positivist
protocols of nineteenth-century historical writing were scarcely immune from
such figuration and indeed might be said to have offered this poetics new force
and grip. How an Orientalist painter died, to repeat, was not just an empirical
but a discursive question, and we must treat such end of life stories as a
rich, aspirational, and broadly vocational mythology, at once varied and
malleable as per the circumstances of the case, even as certain themes and
motifs recur in a manner open to historical and rhetorical analysis.
From
Leonardo to Raphael and many others, accounts of artists’ deaths by Vasari and
his successors offer an important precedent for these concerns. Across
painting, biography, and illustration, artists, critics, and illustrators
rewrote the biographies of the old masters through the filter of their own
aesthetic and critical positions. We generally treat pictures depicting the
last moments of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael as doing strategic
work, nineteenth-century artists seizing on their presumed ancestors as
historical aliases and fashioning a mediated image of the present. And yet the
topic of how nineteenth-century artists died remains by and large unexplored.
Certainly it might seem hard to elicit from nineteenth-century data the topoi,
mythical residue, or “biographical cells” that Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz
explored in stories told about artists from antiquity to the Renaissance.6 We commonly associate nineteenth-century life
writing with the emergence of positivist evidentiary protocols inhospitable to
the kind of mythic formulae projected onto the old masters. The catalogue, the
retrospective, the artist’s correspondance, and other instruments of modern
artistic biography were generally hostile to figurative play. And yet the
emergence of this historiographical edifice should not obscure the sheer
fertility of meaning-making associated with artists’ death, meaning-making
operating not just side by side but embedded within the edifice itself. That
poetics, in short, was sometimes all the more powerful since it took the form
of simple description and in this sense did not seem like mythmaking at all.
Only
rarely did the deaths of nineteenth-century artists qualify for visual
illustration, still less were they staged in drama or fiction. The
Death of Gericault, painted in 1824 by a member of his circle, offers an
important exception in this regard, notable in part because of its association
with a death mask of the Gericault that proved crucial to the legend of the
artist as it took shape. Alexandre Decamps painted The Suicide in
1835, inspired it was held by the suicide earlier that year of Léopold Robert.
Alexandre Menjaud completedGirodet Bids Farewell to his Studio in
1826 shortly after the master’s death, but despite these examples such visual
evocations are rare. By and large, for the nineteenth century these practices
of figuration lie on textual terrain, from formal artistic biographies to
obituary notices and casual recollections circulated in the press. Inscribed
within and sometimes working against the secular protocols of life-writing that
eventually came to dominate such writing system wide, they open a revealing
window onto the psychologically and historically configured imperatives that
shaped and structured an artist’s vocation, from their studios to their
deathbeds.
Let
me make two additional points before developing a series of examples in greater
detail. Whether the deaths of Orientalist artists inspired a more varied or
elaborate poetics than, say, the deaths of landscape or history painters in the
nineteenth century, is an important question that lies beyond the compass of
the present study. “The Sun is God,” Turner is said to have uttered on his
deathbed – arguably the most famous last words by any artist (the tale
traceable to Ruskin, although whether Turner said them is doubtful). But by way
of a preliminary hypothesis, I want to argue that a combination of historical,
geopolitical, and cultural factors combined to give Orientalist narratives of
mortality singularly deep purchase. Many recent accounts of nineteenth-century
Orientalist painting emphasize its invented, idealized, and indeed ideological
character – ideological work, as the argument goes, that operates invisibly
thanks to that painting’s typically realist idiom. Whether or not we sign on to
the charge, at the very least we may say that precisely Orientalist’s invented
and escapist character offered a ready platform for end-of-life narratives to
take flight. Orientalism perhaps most of all among nineteenth-century art
movements nurtured an elegiac poetics of mortality, loss and exile that left
painter and career, life and art, mysteriously and sometimes fatally – like
“The Orient” itself — intertwined.
Finally,
I want to make the additional point that for all its richly imaginative
character, this poetics was not simply born from studio voyages. It was fruit
of the broadly naturalist climate of the mid- and later-nineteenth century, as
Western artists travelled to North Africa and the Middle East, and the
profession of the painter-traveler took shape. Each of the artists discussed in
this essay actually journeyed to “The Orient,” several of them on multiple
occasions and two (Fromentin and Gustave Guillaumet) leaving behind important
literary monuments. Following in the tracks laid by colonial expansion,
painters and illustrators established commercially successful practices that
highlighted the first-hand, observational basis of their exotic
representations. Needless to say, artists also mined the classic tropes that in
the Western imagination defined the region’s climate and geography — the
desert, the caravan, and the oasis, among others. But it was the reality of
such journeys that gave this poetics special feeling. Such travel, as it
seemed, marked a painter’s eyes, body, speech, and affect — in short how
painters lived and how they died.
Death Abroad
The
risks were real. The Scottish born history painter David Wilkie died at age
fifty-six outside Gibraltar aboard the steamer SS Oriental in June
1841, en route home from Syria and Constantinople. The exact cause of death is
uncertain, but the surgeon aboard theOriental, who took careful
notes as Wilkie deteriorated, writes that the artist came aboard in Alexandria
already sick, and that his condition deteriorated rapidly following the
consumption of fruit and iced lemonade purchased during a stop in Malta. The
Spectatorreports that passengers on the steamship lobbied the captain to
bring Wilkie’s body ashore, but the Governor at Gibraltar refused permission
and the artist was buried at sea that evening at 8:30 pm, just before sunset.7
The
availability of the surgeon’s notes helped assure that Wilkie’s biographers
would confine themselves to clinical descriptions of his final hours. His death
resonated in British visual culture for decades after, however, thanks in large
part to his friend J. M. W. Turner, who made Wilkie’s burial at sea the subject
of one of his most famous pictures. “The midnight torch gleam’d, o’er the
steamer’s side,” explained Turner in The Fallacies of Hope, when
his Peace-Burial at Sea was first exhibited in 1842 (along
side War, The Exile and the Rock Limpet, a pendant also themed
on the topic of exile, and featuring Napoleon on the Island of St. Helena).
Ruskin, as it happens, was disparaging about Turner’s use of black, and many
other critics found fault in Turner’s disinclination to describe the event with
exacting accuracy. But eventually it became one of the artist’s best-known
pictures, routinely inspiring more sympathetic viewers to spiritual heights.
Turner, explained Ralph Nicolson Wornum, keeper of the National Gallery, in
account of the picture published next to a mezzotint by Alfred-Louis
Brunet-Debaines, was not the kind of artist to be “tested by realism.”
Figure 2. Joseph Mallord William
Turner, Peace—Burial at Sea, 1842, oil on canvas, 87 x 87 cm, Tate Britain,
London.
Nor
might we add was Turner tested by the facts of the case. The burial time of
8:30pm was widely noted, but perhaps in an effort to motivate the great
contrast of light and dark that so puzzled the picture’s first viewers and
continues to puzzle scholars into the present day (Paulson goes as far as to
suggest the great mass of black on the ship is in fact a London stagecoach, an
allusion to the burial at home that was denied to Wilkie), Turner sets the hour
at midnight, as if to dramatize the symbolic darkness of the occasion by a
striking contrast of light and dark. And while the light is torchlight, John
Mollet described the picture’s effect of hyper-natural illumination as almost
“mystical” in character — a “great flood of crimson light that seems to consecrate
the temporary chapel of the waist of the ship, and the coffin’s plunge into the
illuminated wave of crimson flood of light.”8 Of course Mollet was right – transcendent
effects of light dominate Turner’s art through and through. But on this
occasion we may say that Turner adapts that commitment to a metaphorics of
illumination already inscribed in Orientalist painting and criticism, a claim
we will have occasion to revisit in the remarks ahead.
Another
example, in this case an artist who perished in the field. Clément Boulanger, a
pupil of Ingres, saw success at the Salon in the 1820s and 1830s before signing
up in 1841 as recorder to an archeological expedition led by Charles Texier to
the ancient city of Magnesia, in the Meander Valley. As Alexandre Dumas
recalled in his recollections of the artist, in September 1842 the group was at
work excavating a magnificent temple to Diana, destroyed in an earthquake and now
partially under water. Unwisely seeking to complete a sketch “in the full heat
of the midday sun,” Boulanger succumbed to a “one of those bouts of sunstroke,
so dangerous in the Orient.” Achmet Bey, the Governor, sent his carriage and
attendants “for the use of the sick man,” but too late, and the only medical
treatment available was from “bad Greek doctors, like those that killed Byron.”
A report in the Smyrna Journal, reprinted in the French press, adds
that upon being taken ill, native workers at the site were sent off to fish for
leaches (Byron was also bled), but the physician in charge of treatment was not
a Greek native but rather was attached to their ship, L’Expéditive.9 Falling
into a delirium, Dumas continues, Boulanger was set in a hammock in a nearby
mosque and died within five days, “singing and laughing” but “not doubting he
was dying.”10
The
funeral of this thirty-seven year old painter was prestigious. Boulanger’s body
was transported to Scala Nova (present day Ku?adas? in Turkey) by horse,
attended by “eight Greeks” and a dozen sailors from L’Expeditive. Reports
in the French and English press add that that the ceremony drew local diplomats
as well as a contingent of clergy, not to mention all the Christian residents
of the city, who gathered to meet the cortege upon its arrival. Dumas claimed
that no less than three thousand people trailed Boulanger’s coffin by the time
it arrived at the French legation in Constantinople – quite wrong, since the
body never travelled there. But we do know that in a show of patriotic
solidarity, French houses and commercial institutions adorned their facades
with funeral banners and flags, as did ships offshore. Other locals, too, it
was reported, would pay their respects to fallen artist. To be sure, the stakes
for these communities differed, sited as they were on hierarchically distinct
positions on the “imaginative geography” (Said’s term) that mapped Boulanger’s
path to the tomb. But in each case, the honors shown an artist charged with
retrieving a community’s lost or forgotten history operates as a legitimating
topos of imperial culture, just that homage seeming to fuel a sense of
solidarity on the ground, and reported up to readers back home.
This
cultural work of mourning operates not only over space but over time, the
deaths of Boulanger and Wilkie sending out a lingering after-image of the
painter-traveller’s journey gone awry. “Poor Clément Boulanger,” writes Louis
Gonse in the Gazette des beaux-artsin 1874, upon encountering one
of his pictures in Lille. “He rests now, unknown, in the cloister
of a Greek church in Smyrna, where probably no traveller thinks of going to
render him pious homage.”11 In fact this was not quite right
— Gonse’s lament for Boulanger’s forgotten tomb was enabled in part by the fact
it was not forgotten, but rather formed part of an elegiac, Orientalist tour.
Travelling to Constantinople a decade later after Boulanger’s death, Théophile
Gautier reports encountering a plaque honoring Boulanger in the exterior
cloister the Greek Church near the marketplace in Smyrna. “The Tomb of a
compatriot in a foreign land,” confessed Gautier, has always something of a
sadness in its associations, be it from an unacknowledged selfishness of
humanity, or from a vague impression that the foreign soil presses more heavily
upon the ashes which it covers.”12Note the chance character of the
encounter. It may well be that Gautier had been informed of the memorial, or
that his guide took him to see it. But in the narrative as he stages it,
serendipity leads him to explore a mysterious cloister in a provincial town,
only to discover the faded trace of another who preceded him. “Foreign soil,” Gautier
explains, seemed to press “more heavily” on the fallen artist than burial in
his native land, although of course what Gautier means is that it pressed more
heavily on himself, his encounter with Boulanger’s ashes catalyzing traveller’s
anxiety for home. Other travellers, too, in the years ahead, took note of the
plaque and sent in reports for readers back home, including Adolphe Joanne and
Emile Isambert in 1861, and Emile Bourquelot in 1886.13 A mournful poetics of the
forgotten exile rested on the possibility of sometimes being remembered. For
Boulanger this took the form of an actual site on a cultural and archeological
tour. But the principle obtains for Wilkie as well, British travellers steaming
past Gibraltar taking note of the approximate location where the SS
Oriental consigned their compatriot to the deep.
Sacrifice
and Representation
Another
death in the field saw friends rally round a painter in an effort to inscribe
his fatal pilgrimage in the canon of British art. Affiliated with the
Pre-Raphaelite circle, Thomas Seddon died of in November 1856, at the age of
thirty-five, while on his second visit to Cairo. Three years earlier the
born-again Christian had accompanied Holman Hunt on a voyage to Egypt and
subsequently Jerusalem, pitching a tent in the surrounding hills and studying
its sites. From this campaign Seddon completed what is generally regarded as
his masterpiece, Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill
of Evil Counsel, whose striking topographical and geological accuracy
inscribes a tri-partite allegory of resurrection readily accessible to a viewer
informed by similar Christian fervor. Commercial success cemented Seddon’s conviction
he should return to the Middle East, again with the idea of undertaking sacred
subjects, and to which he proposed to bring a new level of documentary veracity
based on first hand-observation of the region’s topography, flora, and geology.
The motivation for this disciplined program was less artistic than educational
– precisely by sacrificing, as it seemed, fatuous claims to originality, Seddon
could present the Holy Land to audiences back home for their religious benefit:
“He wished to present to those who could not visit it an accurate record, not a
fancy view, of the very ground our Savior so often trod,” explained Seddon’s
brother, in a note to The Atheneum in 1879.14All of this is to say that Seddon’s
embrace of unmediated realism was less an aesthetic position than a moral
obligation. His conviction he must forego anything “fancy” constituted a
willing and deliberate act of artistic selflessness.
Figure 3. Thomas Seddon, Jerusalem and
the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel, 1854–5, oil on canvas,
67 x 83 cm, Tate Britain, London.
Within
a few weeks of his arrival in Cairo, Seddon came down sick — “thrown for a
sharp curb,” he wrote his wife, indeed perhaps “punished” for “a want of
attention to His Sabbath,” Seddon confessing to having walked the streets and
alleys after church on Sunday, rather than returning home to rest.15 The days ahead offered an uncanny
mirror-reversed image of an earlier experience: during his first trip to Egypt,
Seddon had nursed a fellow traveller known only as Nicholson, moving him from
Cairo to the Pyramids as he declined and finally died. But on this occasion, as
commentators rued following a memoir on Seddon published by the artist’s
brother, it fell to a physician and missionary in the Cairo community of
expatriates to take this obligation on: “and when, after no long period, he
himself lay on his deathbed, in the same land of strangers, it is touching to
know that a friend as devoted was raised up to him, and the cup of cold water
he had given to another held to his own parched lips by a gentle Christian
hand.”16 A mere four weeks following his
arrival Seddon was dead, felled by dysentery in all likelihood acquired on the
passage from Marseilles.
Needless
to say, Seddon’s death struck friends and admirers hard, many of them yielding
to magical thinking in an effort to assign agency where there was none. Look no
further in this regard that Seddon himself, whom as friends report, had
recently confessed to intimations of mortality. He neither “expected nor
desired,” Seddon’s brother recalled, “to be long lived.” Indeed it “really
seemed as if he felt a presentiment of his death, and was studiously making
preparation for it.” Seddon’s circle of friends found comfort in this notion,
Seddon’s serenity and good nature in the face of these intimations helping to
lift the pall cast by his death and mobilizing their commemorative work in
turn. The tragic outcome of his second tour would be assimilated to a divinely
inspired master plan. The death of this artist in the field was not simply an
occupational hazard, but the highest expression of his devotion and even his
destiny. The quest for first-hand observation that underwrote his journey was a
spiritual quest through and through, an artistic version of an ethics of
sacrifice that found its highest expression in Seddon’s early passage into
eternal life.
All
this and more informed the attitudes of his friends when they gathered at the
house of Ford Maddox Ford for the purpose of preserving Seddon’s memory in the
annals of British art. Together with Holman Hunt, John Ruskin, and others in
the Pre-Raphaelite circle, they launched a subscription campaign to acquire
Seddon’s Jerusalem for the nation, in the end purchasing the
picture for six hundred pounds and offering it to the National Gallery. This,
too, as it seemed, was part of Seddon’s master plan. His brother reports that
he had proposed to let the picture go at a low price to a collector, with the
proviso it be offered to the Gallery after his death; and that in still another
scheme, Seddon had planned to present a large copy of the picture for a “public
institution,” so that others may have “a correct representation of the very
places that were so often trod by our Redeemer during His sojourn on earth.”17
For
an account of Seddon’s aesthetics self-effacement, look no further than Ruskin,
who praised Seddon’s Holy Land subjects for their absence of art. It was
Seddon’s presence there, Ruskin explained, and the mortal risks that presence
entailed, that assured the truthfulness and sincerity of his pictures, and
hence his seeming invisibility at the scene of representation. Seddon’s
landscapes, Ruskin explained, were “the first” to unite “perfect artistical
with topographical accuracy.” The first to be “directed, with stern
self-restraint, to no other purpose than to giving those who cannot travel,
trustworthy knowledge of the scenes which ought to be most interesting to
them.” All previous efforts at truth in this area had been “more or less
subordinate to pictorial or dramatic effect,” in other words what Seddon’s
brother had termed “fancy.” For Seddon anything fancy was absent. His “primal
object,” Ruskin insists, was to “place the spectator, as far as art can do it,
in the scene represented, and to give him the perfect sensation of its reality,
wholly unmodified by the artist’s execution.”18 It is hard to imagine a fuller
statement of an of artful self-sacrifice – artful because the guarantor of
Seddon’s invisibility was the fact he was there, his presence assuring his
viewers they were seeing the truth even as he relinquished all claims for this
art and put his own life at risk. Seddon’s humble dream of unmediated realism
on another’s behalf stands as artistic counterpart to his own readiness to
follow the path of Christ, literally and figuratively to the Promised Land.
Surrendering his art for the sake of a truthful representation, Seddon’s death
was not simply a risk associated with his voyage but in a sense its fulfillment
— hence Ruskin, as he called on the public to throw itself behind “the
sacrifice of the life of a man of genius to the serviceable veracity of his
art.”19
The
Sun and Death
“Light!”
exclaimed Henri Regnault as he fell in January 1871, his “last cry” evoking the
immersive, sun-filled dream that took him from Paris to Rome, Madrid, Granada,
and finally Tangier.20 Doubtless it is farfetched to imagine
the famous hero of the Franco-Prussian War, killed outside Paris on a cold,
gray afternoon, to have shouted out the word encapsulating his journey to “the
land of the sun” — not least of all because no one saw him fall. But the tale,
sent around three decades later by Gabriel Hanotaux, a leading historian and
diplomat, speaks to the currency of an Orientalist poetics of illumination that
so colored Regnault’s memory that readers could imagine exactly that. For
Regnault as for many others, a well-trodden metaphorics of light came utterly
to saturate Orientalist art criticism and artistic biography, the sun seeming
at once to illuminate their artistic path but also trail them to the grave.
Countless
painter-travellers would be described as setting out for the “land of the sun,”
at once in an effort to brighten their palettes but also in search of a deeper
sense of artistic renewal. The sun stands as a figure of vocational rebirth,
artists recharging their enterprise in the face of climatic and atmospheric
effects that bordered on the inimitable. Reentry, accordingly, was invariably
difficult, Orientalist painters suffering and even dying from withdrawal under
the grey skies of Northern Europe. The thirty-six year old Prosper Marilhat,
for example, seemingly “haunted” by his journey to the Orient, was “suffocated
by the fogs of the North.”21 Théodore Chassériau, a pupil of
Ingres but “touched” by Delacroix, made several trips to Algeria only to be cut
down in Paris in 1856, at the age of thirty-seven. Chassériau, lamented
Gautiert, “sleeps in the darkness of the tomb,” an ironic fate for this “ardent
artist who loved the sun” and whose paintings made Gautier “drunk with light”
(more on Chassériau shortly).22
Figure 4. Charles de Tournemine, Hélios
photo, upload, stitch and restoration by Jebulon,Bibliothèque nationale de
France.
Figure 5. Charles de Tournemine,
Turkish Women in Setting Sun, 1863, oil on canvas, 68 x 125 cm, Musée Fabre,
Montpellier.
Deathbed
narratives rewrote the painter’s journey into the sun in spiritual terms, the
tracks laid by an Orientalist culminating in a final encounter that marked his
passage into eternal life. Take the case of Charles de Tournemine, an
underrated Toulon-born painter and curator at the Luxembourg museum (and model
for the Orientalist painter Coriolus in the Goncourt’s Manette Salomon).23 Tournemine made several trips to
Algeria, Asia Minor, and Egypt in 1850s and 1860s, including an invitation in
1869 to attend the inauguration of the Suez Canal. After helping to safeguard
the Luxembourg’s collections during the Franco-Prussian War and Commune,
Tournemine returned to his native Toulon to nurse his deteriorating health. To
no avail, however, Toulon dying in 1872 following a slow decline in his
physical and mental faculties. J.L. Turrel, a noted physician, naturalist, and
supporter of the arts in Toulon and Marseilles, reports that in his last days
Tournemine fell into a delirium, the artist confusing past and present as he
imagined himself once again in the land of the sun. Tournemine’s “poor mind,
feverish from sun,” sought a final journey into the light — “he wanted to forge
straight into these lands of the sun that he had so loved and were the
aspiration of his life.”24 Indeed even to India, its “sun
and fruits” tempting his now unhinged mind. But if the illness was “cruel,” the
“agony was gentle,” the physician insists, for in the end Tournemine regressed
to a childlike state, and the “doors of his tomb” opened precisely in the
“crib.” As from “chrysalis to butterfly,” Tournemine finally found himself on
the threshold of “what was always his ideal, towards the great, eternal light.”
Figure 6. Prosper Marilhat, Ezbekiyah
Street in Cairo, 1833, oil on canvas, 54 x 42 cm, The Hermitage, St.
Petersburg.
The
lamented Marilhat, remembered today in a striking portrait by Chassériau,
offers another version of this regressive scenario, alas less redemptive than
poignant and strange. Returning to Paris in the spring of 1833 after a long
voyage to Egypt, where he served as recorder to a scientific expedition before
eventually striking out on his own, Marilhat sent to the Salon a suite of
landscape and urban subjects that captured the interest of Gautier and other
Romantic critics. And while he never returned to the Middle East, Marilhat
continued to mine this youthful journey until 1847, when syphilis sent the thirty-six
year old painter to the grave. Critics who knew him noted creeping signs of
mental illness overtook Marilhat in the early 1840s, triggered in part by an
unexpected blow to his artistic pride. In 1844 he was nominated for the Légion
d’honneur by his ally Prosper Marilhat (or at his urging), only to be
rejected. The news came as a shock, although this was hardly a surprise given
his youth. In fact later that year Marilhat received something like a
consolation prize in the form of a substantial commission that would have
allowed him to return to Egypt or elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle
East. But this could not soften a blow that embittered the artist and seemed to
fuel his instability.
Figure 7. Théodore Chassériau, Portrait
of Prosper Marilhat, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
As
the delusion took hold, Marilhat fell victim to a compulsive perfectionism,
beginning many new canvases only to abandon them in anger and frustration. As
Gautier explained, Marilhat did not work from an ébauche but
brought different parts of his canvas to completion before touching the rest of
the picture, an unusual procedure that his mental illness exaggerated to a
dramatic degree.25 In March 1847, overtaken by
“melancholy” and prone to fits, Marilhat left Paris and retreated to his native
Thiers, in the Auvergne. But the change in setting could not halt the delusions
so common to syphilitic dementia, and in the end he quit painting altogether.
Gomot,
whose 1884 biography of Marilhat draws on first hand reports, speaks of several
instances where Marilhat’s mental illness and his Orientalism seemed
unexpectedly to intersect. Marilhat’s family, worried by further signs of deterioration
and thinking that a return to the studio might prove therapeutic for the
artist, supplied him with materials and encouraged him to draw. To their
amazement, they discovered that his abilities had entirely left him. Pencil and
paper in hand, he set upon tracing stick figures as if in the margins of a
schoolbook — the talent of the “Orientalist painter had been reduced to that of
a child.” The artist was dead, Goumot explains, his “light extinguished,”
and “his conception (idea) taken flight forever to the land of myrtles
and oleander.”26 And from this moment, Gomot
explains, Marilhat would speak with strange serenity of the time “when I was
a painter” – quant j’étais peintre, Goumot
underlining the phrase. Unable even to draw, Marilhat lost himself
in memories of the Orient — the dromedaries and serpents in the desert, the
“blue ibis in a melancholic pose on the banks of a river,” a “veiled woman
passing like shadows,” – all that and more “lived in his spirit from
the time when I was a painter.”27 The painter whose powers have left him withdraws
into a child-like rehearsal of his earlier life. Dimly conscious of his own
transformation, Marilhat calls upon the Orient as mnemonic refuge, allowing him
to retreat in his mind where he could no longer travel in space.
The
regressive cycle marched inexorably forward. In his last months Marilhat was
overtaken by a determination to return to Paris from Thiers. Alarmed by the
prospect, Marilhat’s family had him committed. Family and friends who visited
the artist in the weeks before his death in September 1847 found he barely recognized
them, and for that matter had little sense of his former self. But the blow to
his pride held to have triggered his decline clung to him in the form of a
compulsive re-enactment. And also to cling to him was his Orientalist dream,
only now in the form of a child’s nightmare. As Goumot explained, the painter
spent his last days compulsively drawing the outline of the Légion
d’honneur on the walls of his room at asylum. When friends spoke to
him of Egypt, in an effort to “pluck the strings of his memory,” Marilhat’s
mumbled replies were incoherent — except for a phrase, now uttered in fear:
“the camels, the camels!”28
Figure 8. Alfred Dehodencq, Self
Portrait, 1870, oil on canvas, High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Other
versions of a quest derailed populate the corpus of Orientalist artistic
biography. The sun, for example, could not only redeem but disable. Its
regenerative power could go awry, consuming the painter from within. Alfred
Dehodencq, who made multiple trips to Morocco in the 1840s and 1850s, would be
described as suffering from a withdrawal of illumination that distorted his
painting before sending him to the grave. We owe our account of Dehodencq to
philosopher Gabriel Séailles, whose texts on Leonardo da Vinci, Eugène
Carrière, and other topics once attracted wide readership. Séailles spoke of
the dissatisfaction that gradually overtook Dehodencq upon his return to Paris,
signaled in his inability to complete his paintings, in their destruction at
his own hands, and in the introduction of exaggerated and unnatural light
effects. Haunted by the memory of transcendence past, the sun that had fueled
his enterprise now drove him into decline: “he could see nothing but what shone
inside him. Did his tired eyes lose a feeling for sense of nuance? Were they
satisfied with nothing but dazzling light?” In his last years, Séailles adds,
Dehodencq brought to his painting a jarring intensity of illumination: he
wanted “full-on light . . . direct, immediate impact — force without artifice,
without resort to contrasts, an explosion of pure colors at their highest
pitch.”29 Unconfirmed reports claim the
sixty-year-old Dehodencq took his own life, although Séailles himself is silent
on the topic, attributing his death to the painter catching a cold after the
funeral of a friend. Regardless of the actual circumstances, at the very least
we may say the sun tracks Dehodencq’s decline, luring him into a search for
false transcendence. Where once the sun had rejuvenated the artist, its toxic
residue now claimed him as victim.
Fiction
and artistic biography overlap in the case of Naz de Coriolis, the Orientalist
painter whose career the Goncourts recount in Manette Salomon. Following
his return from Asia Minor, Coriolis becomes lover to his model Manette. Their
union goes awry as Manette, a Jew, gradually isolates Coriolis in a Semitic
domestic sphere he neither controls nor understands. The novel ends not with
Coriolis dying but with his marrying Manette. But it’s worth emphasizing that
his artistic decline, like that of Dehodencq, takes an Orientalist turn, Coriolis
succumbing to an optical disorder that appears to “deregulate” and “trouble”
his eyesight, and creating an insatiable desire for light. Paintings by
the old masters that he once admired seemed too dark: “of light, he could find
nothing but the pale memory. Something seemed to be missing in the encounter
with these immortal canvases: the sun.”30 Coriolis now works only in the
brightest light of day, overcompensating for the seeming darkness around him.
His mental deposits of light-filled transcendence proved impossible to
stabilize and control, distorting his paintings and tilting him into decline.
Redemption
in the Studio
A
passing detail concerning Chassériau’s funeral, cited by Gautier 1856, opens a
window onto yet another elegiac theme – the painter united with his art from
the grave. Gautier spoke of spotting a mysterious Arab man in a great black
cape following the Chassériau’s funeral cortege with “Oriental gravity,”
reading verses from the Koran, sprinkling water on his coffin, and adorning the
painter’s mortuary chapel with a yellow wreath.31 The Luxembourg’s curator Léonce
Bénédite, in a manuscript on Chassériau left unfinished at Bénédite’s death in
1925, reported finding a note in Chassériau’s estate that seventy francs should
be given to “the Arab,” leading Bénédite to conclude that this mysterious mourner
must have been a North African native whom Chassériau employed as model.
Certainly this was a reasonable speculation, although the precise circumstances
surrounding this mysterious figure are impossible to determine with certainty.
But more important is the fact Gautier tells the story in the first place, and
that Bénédite takes it up in turn. This mysterious “Arab” who performs rituals
at Chassériau’s tomb is for Gautier more than a model. He is the living agent
of Chassériau’s Orientalism, at once impenetrable and yet rendering honors to
Chassériau for being represented in the first place – indeed not just rendering
honors but, as we might put it, interpellated as subject on
Orientalist terms. His model, the Orient “itself” – most of all he is the subject
that Chassériau sets out to portray, now come alive to mourn his maker. The
idea might seem farfetched, were it not that a memorial to another fallen
Orientalist would propose exactly that.
Figure 9. Gustave Guillaumet, Lhagouat,
Algeria, 1879, oil on canvas, 123 x 180 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris..
For
the lofty character of the Orientalist painter’s final journey, for the
realization that his voyage into the sun was merely a rehearsal for a moment of
transcendence revealed only on the other side of a one-way journey, and for the
possibility such a redemptive metaphorics might be tasked with still more
intimate work, look no further than Gustave Guillaumet. Today the painter’s
fame rests principally on his Desert of 1868, a spectacular
panorama that unites the sun, the desert, and a barely visible caravan in an
exalted meditation on humanity’s struggle for existence in the face of the
sun’s crushing power. Multiple additional trips to Algeria saw Guillaumet
retreat from the grandiloquence of hisDesert in favor a more
Impressionist-style, observational project. Guillaumet’s Laghouat of
1879 and other paintings from this era established him as the leading French
interpreter of the Algerian landscape and its local population, his urban
scenes seeming to breathe with a sense of terrestrial exhalation nurtured by
the sun’s animating embrace.
Of
modest origins, success at the Salon brought Guillaumet substantial wealth and
the promise of still greater success, promise cut short by his death in 1887 at
the age of forty-seven. Twenty minutes before he passed, his biographer
reports, Guillaumet was seized by a vision. At last free of pain, his features
took on ecstatic expression: “alone with his soul at eternity’s gate,” all of a
sudden his face was “transfigured”:
A
vision came to him; the abundance of light to which he had dedicated his life
reassembled before his eyes like a dazzling Grebe; it was the glory,
undoubtedly, it was the goodbye to the sun, that, in this last moment, he
believed he saw shining brightly. He stretched forth his arms, and in an
attitude of ineffable admiration, he said these words, the last he would ever
pronounce: “What gold! What gold! How beautiful it is! What
golden palms!”32
Whether
these were truly Guillaumet’s last words, and whether he truly died minutes
later still with “a smile on his face” is impossible to verify. But
verification is beside the point in the face of a deathbed discovery that
rewrote Guillaumet’s worldly enterprise as a search for transcendence all
along. His quest for the sun the sun was transformed in death, redeeming the
painter in spirit as it had sustained his vocation. Bidding the sun goodbye, he
welcomes its true face the figure of his future glory. The golden palms of
posterity mark his passage into eternal life.
The
story neither ends there nor begins there, however. As turns out, the
circumstances behind Guillaumet’s demise were scarcely exalted. French papers
spoke hesitatingly about the scandal, but the New York Times did
not hold back, explaining that Guillaumet apparently shot himself in the chest
following a quarrel with his mistress, “a lady who was his senior by many years.”
What happened to the mistress in the hours that followed is never made clear,
but we learn that his wife along with her son retrieved the mortally wounded
artist and had him brought, at his request, to his studio, so that he could be
surrounded by his sketches of Algeria “for the last time.”33 Eight days passed before
Guillaumet succumbed, long enough for his physicians to regain hope he might
survive the trauma; and long enough for the painter to reconcile with his wife,
Guillaumet proposing they return to Lhagouat and other sites in Algeria, at
once the setting for his art and for the renewal of their vows. The painter’s
devotion to his art and his domestic sphere were now united in perfect if
tragic identity, as if these historic antimonies could only be recalibrated at
death’s door: “’if I get out of this,’ he told his wife, ‘we will return to
Lhagouat. Do you remember how well I was working?… I have never worked so well
as when I was with you…’” By day six Guillaumet had deteriorated, however. By
the next day everyone knew the end was near.
Figure 10. LouisErnestBarrias, Tomb
of Gustave Guillaumet, 1890, Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris.
Figure 11. LouisErnest Barrias, The
Young Girl of Bou Saâda, after 1890, ivory, silveredbronze, wood, motherofpearl
and turquoise, 12 3/8 × 11 1/4 × 10 1/2 in. Acquired by Henry Walters, 1900,
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Neither
the manner of Guillaumet’s death nor a redemptive metaphorics of light appear
to figure in Louis-Ernest Barrias’s magnificent monument to Guillaumet,
unveiled in 1890 at Montparnasse Cemetery, and where it remains to this day.
The sculpture saw enormous success, although countless reductions in bronze and
other materials have served to obscure the commemorative circumstances
initially attached to its making. The installation at Montparnasse features
a Young Woman of Bou Saâda sitting on the monument, along with
a medallion portrait of Guillaumet, also by Barrias, set on its base, together
with the titles of Guillaumet’s pictures inscribed in the stone behind. The
seated figure was in fact a variant Barrias’s Spinner of Megara, sent
up from Rome for the Salon of 1870 while he was still a pensionnaire at
the Villa Medici. Reworking the figure for Guillaumet’s tomb, Barrias changes
the position of the girl’s hands, so that she now drops flowers on his grave
rather than spins. More generally, he “orientalizes her,” switching out
the Spinner’s Greek features, hair, and cloak for a melancholy
muse with North African features, Algerian dress, a North African rug, and
native Algerian flowers that she drops one by one on his Guillaumet’s tomb.
Barrias’s
young flower girl also recalls female figures from Guillaumet’s own painting,
for example his Weavers at Bou Saâda, exhibited in 1885
and again at a retrospective following his death. Whether it was this picture
or similar interior subjects that Barrias had in mind we cannot say, but the
notion that the girl derived from Guillaumet’s own painting was central to the
conceit Barrias put in place, and was commonly described as exactly that.
Charles Bigot, for one, made the point, noting that the features and attitude
of this “young woman of Kabyla” owed nothing to Greece. Rather, she was “just
the kind of girl Guillaumet frequently painted, either sowing or sitting at
home, going to get to water or returning with it.” Indeed she “personified”
Guillaumet’s oeuvre, Bigot explained, and surely Guillaumet himself would have
wanted “no other image for his tomb.”34 The trope reaches back to
Pygmalion, now reborn as a naturalist fantasy in a tragic key. The painter’s
muse comes to life in the form of his model, only this muse is not the
painter’s lover but his mourner. Nor in fact is she his model in the traditional
sense, since Guillaumet was held not to employ models but native girls
unaccustomed to posing. In short, and like the “Arab” who trailed Chassériau’s
tomb, the young woman who mourns Guillaumet is a figure for the “real Orient” —
truly an effect of his naturalist discourse, and yet seemingly offered up by
nature itself.
Figure 12. Gustave Guillaumet, Weavers
at Bou Saâda, c. 1885, oil on canvas, 94 x 112 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
A
posthumous retrospective at the École des Beaux-arts offered critics the opportunity
to revisit Guillaumet’s Spinners of Bou Saada, and more
generally to take stock of the painter’s career and its sudden conclusion. For
all their determination to remain silent on the circumstances of Guillaumet’s
death, their readings worked to cement the urgent renewal of vows that followed
the bizarre conduct that had brought him to his deathbed. Guillaumet’s friend
Durand-Gréville, writing in L’Artiste, cites the Spinners
of Bou Saadaand others like it as evidence of a true “collaboration” between
the artist and his spouse. Without her, Duran-Greville insists, Guillaumet
would never have been able to secure models, still less overcome their nervous
stares as he walked into the studio, not to mention their tendency simply to
slip away.35 The peaceful, absorptive, and as
it seemed timeless rituals that populate his Algerian subjects were wholly the
fruit of a collaboration between husband and wife. Scarcely is it farfetched,
under the circumstances, to imagine Barrias’sYoung Woman of Bou Saada as
re-inscribing on Guillaumet’s tomb the idealized union of art and domesticity
that his violent quarrel so scandalously undermined. To be sure such a reading
might seem scarcely open to verification. But certainly Barrias was
sufficiently well-informed, and indeed sufficiently invested, to put such a
message in place. Not only were he and Guillaumet friends, but Guillaumet had
studied with Barrias’s brother, the painter Felix-Joseph Barrias (not an
Orientalist, deceased in 1907 under circumstances unknown, but author of The
Death of Chopin, painted in 1885 and in its day widely reproduced).
Orientalist
artists died in ways like anyone else, but by virtue of their exotic trajectories
they attracted to their deathbeds a rich metaphorics of mortality that the
present pages have only begun to unpack. Suffice it to close with another
example, as it happens another occasion that saw Barrias charged with
commemorating a fallen friend. The scene united the work of mourning and
representation, even as Barrias effaced the work of his hand in an effort to
preserve the features dear to him. On January 27 1871, five days following
Henri Regnault’s death at the Battle of Buzenval, Barrias together with Georges
Clairin pulled a plaster mold from their dead friend’s face, following the
delivery of his body to Père Lachaise. In the years ahead this intimate
artifact was molded in plaster, cast in bronze, and widely photographed,
allowing countless Frenchmen to reflect on the death of a painter destined, as
it seemed, one day to lead the French school.36 The installation in 1900 of the
original plaster at the Musée Carnavalet allowed still more viewers to view up
close this effigy of the Prix de Rome painter who, returning to Paris from
Tangier, joined the National Guard and was killed on his first day of combat.
But between the entry wound on Regnault’s left temple and the smashed nose that
gave him the features of “a Mongol,” to cite one critic’s phrase, what was
called up even more than Regnault’s sun-lit dream was its sudden and definitive
end, expressed for all to see in the path left by a bullet to the brain.
Figure 13. LouisErnest Barrias, Death
Mask of Henri Regnault, 1871, plaster, Musée Carnavalet, Paris.
NOTES
1. See the account in Marius Chaumelin, Decamps,
sa vie, son oeuvre, ses imitateurs (Marseille: Camouin, 1861), 9.↑
2. See Exposition des oeuvres de Léon Belly
à l’Ecole nationale des beaux-arts (Paris: J. Claye, 1878),
which reprints a biography and obituary notice by Emile Bergerat, published the
previous year in theJournal officiel.↑
3. Charles Clément recounts the story of
Gleyre’s illness in Gleyre: Étude biographique et critique, avec le
catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre du maître (Paris, 1878), 116-117. For
additional details, see William Hauptman, Charles Gleyre, 1806-1874:
Biography and Catalogue Raisonné (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995), 1:101.↑
6. For the deaths of the old masters, notable
for this study is Philip Sohm, “Caravaggio’s Deaths,”The Art Bulletin,
84 (September 2002), 449-468. For the impact of Legend, Myth and Magic
in the Myth of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, first published in
1934 along with additional literature on the biography of artists, see
the recent review essay by Perry Chapman, “The Problem With Artists,” The
Art Bulletin 95 (2013): 484-88. Also of special relevance to my essay
is Karen Junod’s analysis of eighteenth-century British artistic biography,
including deathbed scenes (Hogarth in particular), which Junod treats in
broadly topological terms traceable to Vasari’s account of Leonardo and other
models. See “Writing the Lives of the Painters;” Biography and Artistic
Identity in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 116-118;
for nineteenth-century artists’ life-writings in general, see Julie F.
Codell, The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca.
1870–1910(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); also relevant is
Nicholas Green, “Dealing in Temperament: Economic Transformation of the
Artistic Field in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Art
History 10 (March 1987), 59-78. Simon Critchley’s The Book of
Dead Philosophers(New York: Vintage Books, 2008) offers an inspiring model
for the artistic poetics explored in the present essay.↑
7. Allan Cunningham, The life of Sir
David Wilkie With His Journals, Tours and Critical Remarks on Works of Art (London:
John Murray, 1843), 3:143; The Spectator, 14 (1841), 572.↑
8. The Complete Works of John Ruskin,
ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: G. Allen, 1904), 13:159;
Nicolson Warnum, Etchings from the National Gallery (London:
Seely, Jacson, and Halliday, 1876), 31; John William Mollett, Sir David
Wilkie (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881),
103; Ronald Paulson, Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998), 94-95; and Martin Butlin, The Paintings of
J.M.W. Turner(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 1:248.↑
12. Gautier, Constantinople Today (London:
David Bogue, 1854), 65; Emile Bouquet also notes encountering his monument
in Promenade en Egypte et Constantinople (Paris: Challamel,
1886), 317.↑
13. Adophe Joanne and Emile Isambert, Itinéraire
descriptif, historique et archéologique de l’Orient(Paris: Hachette, 1861),
464; Emile Bourquelot, Promenades en Égypte et à Constantinople (Paris:
Challamel, 1886), 317.↑
15. Memoir and Letters of the Late
Thomas Seddon, Artist, ed. John Pollard Seddon (London: Nisbet, 1858),
166-167. For the allegorical content of Jerusalem, see
Nicholas Tromans, “The Holy City,” in The Lure of the East, ed.
Nicholas Tromans (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 166-67.↑
16. “Thomas Seddon and the Christian Artist,” The
Family Treasury of Sunday Reading, ed. Andrew Cameron (London,
1859), 266.↑
18. Ibid, 171. This sense of the humble
character of Seddon’s enterprise survives to this day, Timothy Barringer for
example noting that Jerusalem might well be mistaken for a
“topographical view,” an attitude he contrast to the more “ambitious”
aspirations of Seddon’s travel companion, Holman Hunt. See Reading the
Preraphaelites (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998),
123; Barringer, citing Seddon’s brother, also highlights the “sacrificial” of
Seddon’s commitment to observation, as do other scholars who treat Seddon’s
picture.↑
23. For the Goncourt’s relations with Tournemine
and links between the painter and their fictional protagonist Jean-Claude
Lesage, Charles Tournemine, peintre orientaliste (Aix-en-Provence:
Edisud, 1986), 43-48.↑
24. L. Turrel, “Étude sur Charles Tournemine,
peintre toulounais,” Bulletin de l’Académie du Var, 8 (1877-1878),
77.↑
29. Gabriel Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq:
L’Homme et L’artiste (Paris: Société de propagation des livres d’art,
1910), 173-74. This discussion of Dehodencq and Coriolus is adapted
from my essay, “Figures of Sublimity in French Orientalist Painting,” in Dialogues
in Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern, ed. Elizabeth Cropper,
(Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 317-341.↑
30. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Salomon,
intr. Thierry Paquot (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 427-28.↑
31. Gautier, Portraits contemporains, 270.
Léonce Bénédite, Théodore Chassériau: Sa vie et son oeuvre, ed.
André Dezarrois (Paris: Les Editions Braun, 1931), 2: 522; also see Chassériau:
Un Autre Romantisme (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), 401.↑
32. Tableaux algériens: Ouvrage illustré de
douze eaux-fortes . . . précédé d’une notice sur la vie et les oeuvres de
Guillaumet par Eugène Mouton (Paris: Plon, 1888), 39, and for another account,Catalogue
des tableaux, dessins, pastels et aquarelles provenant de l’atelier G.
Guillaumet. Précédé d’une notice par Durand-Gréville (Paris, 1888).↑
33. New York Times, April 6
1887; also see report by Charles Bigot, “Gustave Guillaumet,” La
Revue Bleue 15 (1888), 240.↑
34. Charles Bigot, “La Sculpture en 1890,” La
Revue Bleue, v. 27 (1890), 817. Alan Doyle, whom I want to
thank for the careful reading of this essay, makes the excellent point that
Barrias’s design encourages the mourner on site uncannily to slip between the
Paris tomb and the mortal East, the flowers dropped by the mourning figure
echoed in the falling leaves Père Lachaise.↑
36. I explore Regnault’s death mask and allied
commemorative practices at length in The Deaths of Henri Regnault (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, in press).↑
About the Author
Marc Gotlieb is
Director of the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art, offered
in collaboration with the Clark Art Institute. His research encompasses
French Romantic art, academic art, Orientalism, and related topics. The Deaths
of Henri Regnault is forthcoming from the University of
Chicago Press in 2015.
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