Patrick Bade
The Louvre, Part 4: French Painting: The “Grandes Machines” from Jacques-Louis David to Delacroix
Patrick Bade | The Louvre, Part 4: French Painting - The Grandes Machines from Jacques-Louis David to Delacroix
- We’re back in the Louvre, and today we’re confining ourself to one very long gallery, runs alongside the Grand Gallery, where the Italian paintings are housed in the south wing of the Louvre that runs alongside the Louvre Seine. And we are looking at what the French call the Grandes Machines. These are enormous history paintings dating from the late 18th to the early 19th century. Some of the most images in western art, images that I’m sure many of them will be very familiar to you, even if it’s only through caricatures. And I mean, this image, for instance, of Delacroix, very, very often used by political cartoonists. Now, here is part of this long gallery, and these pictures were exhibited at the Salon. Salon was an institution that went back to the 17th century to the time of Louis XIV. And it was either annual or biannual. In fact, through much of the period I’m talking about today, it was biannual with the deliberate aim of encouraging to work on a large scale and to paint very ambitious pictures. So this shows the opening of the salon of 1824, and you can see how the pictures were exhibited very different from today. Frame to frame, floor to ceiling. So that was another thing that encouraged artists to work big, because if you paint an exquisite little landscape or still life, you’re not going to get noticed amongst all these huge pictures. Now, I’m starting off in the 1780s with this picture by Jacques-Louis David. It was painted in Rome in 1784, and it was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1785. And the title is the “Oath of the Horatii” and it tells a rather grim story, actually, it’s based on a famous play of Corneille called “Horaces,” although the scene depicted here actually does not appear in Corneille’s play. And it’s the three Horatii brothers, members of the Horatii tribe who are going off to fight a battle with three members of the Curiatii tribe.
They’re actually two related families, but they’ve fallen out with one another and war is declared. And you could say it’s quite a rational way to fight a war, that instead of everybody slaughtering everybody else, they appoint three heroes on each side and they have to fight it out and whoever survives has won the war. And so it’s really a painting about honour. It’s a very high-minded painting about patriotism and loyalty to family. So the three Horatii, they go off and they fight the Curiatii, and out of the six, only one is left standing at the end, that’s Horace. And he comes back and he finds his sister, Camilla, she’s the girl dressed in white on the right-hand side, weeping because her fiance was one of the Curiatii and has just been killed. Well, he’s so high-minded, he thinks, “Oh, she’s not loyal to her country and her family.” So he actually stabs and murders his own sister. And this is an example of high-minded morality. Hardly fits in, I think, with today’s ideas of morality. Now, this picture is a very important one in the history of Western art because it really is the defining masterpiece of the neoclassical style. Neoclassicism, it starts to develop in the 1760s as a reaction to Baroque and Rococo. And it’s one of the most extreme pendulum swings in the history of Western art. They’re absolute opposites in every way. And I can show you by… Amazingly, there is only 16 years between these two pictures. The one on the right, which is not at the Louvre, it’s actually in London in the Wallace Collection, which is a museum I’ll certainly talk about later in the series, by Fragonard. It’s called “The Swing.”
And you can see it’s of course a rather naughty, sexy painting. Not very serious at all. See a man who’s looking up a girl’s skirts. But visually, in every way, it’s the opposite. It’s on a small scale compared to the David. The David is linear. That is, it’s sharply defined contours. If you wanted to make a line engraving just of the contours, you’d have all the information necessary from that picture. You couldn’t really make a line engraving of the Fragonard. It wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. The Fragonard is painterly. It’s quite juicily, painted. Very sweet, pastel colours. And it’s a very complex composition and complex spatially. And once again, with the David, if you want to do a ground plan of this picture, you could make a map. You can’t do that in the Fragonard. And Fragonard, it’s this organic, whirling, composition. So really pretty opposite in every way. Now, as I said, the new Classicism starts in the 1760s and it reaches a climax. And simultaneously, this happens quite rarely actually, in painting, sculpture and architecture, three key figures. There’s David in painting, there’s Canova who’s actually Italian sculptor in sculpture and Ledoux, I’ll show you him in a minute, in architecture. And it was when David and Canova knew each other well, they visited each other’s studios. They were both working in Rome in 1784. So this is Canova’s tomb for Pope Clement XIV. And you can see how similar it is in style, particularly the mourning women, the weeping, mourning women. They could be sisters, couldn’t they, the two sculpture ladies, and the two painted ladies. Another thing, of course… I’m sure I’ve said it, I know I’ve said it before. Look at the difference in the treatment of the drapery. As I said, the ironing board has come out for Neoclassicism so it’s very smooth drapery that hangs on the body and it defines the body underneath it as against all that fluffy fru-fru with the Fragonard. And here, this is actually the Barriere de la Villette. It’s one of the gates in the old tax war of Paris.
And it’s not even five minutes walk from my flat in Paris so I very often walk past it. So Barriere de la Villette by Ledoux. And look how similar. There’s a very severe abstracted version of classical architecture if you look at the columns with a very, very simple capitals and the arches and the colonnade in the upper part of the Ledoux building. It’s almost identical with the architecture in the background of the David. So that was 1785. We’re heading towards the French Revolution. This is Afid’s entry to the salon of 1789. I was just talking with my sister this morning about all the horrible riots that are going on in this country at the moment and about the fact that rioting and revolution is usually a summer activity. The three great French revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. They all happened in the month of July. So this painting was on show in the Salon as well. Actually, no, it would’ve been just before the outbreak of the French Revolution. And it’s also, to me, a very fascinating example of how a work of art can change its meaning as a result of political events. The full title of this picture is “Brutus, First Consul, Returned to His Home Having Condemned His Two Sons who had Joined the Tarquins and Conspired Against Roman Liberty; Lictors Bringing Back the Bodies so that They May be Given Burial.” That is the title! It’s a rather long title. But when he painted it, it was actually bought by a member of the royal family. When it was first exhibited, nobody saw anything anti royalist or revolutionary about it. But once the revolution had broken up, it became really one of the icons of the French Revolution.
And it took on this anti-monarchist meaning. It’s a very extraordinary picture. You see Brutus here in the shadow, obviously brooding on this terrible thing that he’s had to do, which is to sentence his own sons to death for treason. I’m always very taken with this area in this. It’s a strange composition when you think about it, isn’t it, with the figures away from the centre of the picture, either on the left or on the right. And as we… Let’s go back for a moment . The oath of Horatii, one of the features of this picture compared to the Fragonard is the separation of parts. Even in a Baroque painting, a Rubens or a Tietler or a Fragonard, there’s this kind of organic flow, one part flowing into another. This is very staccato. Boom, boom, boom. Separate parts. And in both these two pictures, you have gender zones. There’s the male zone on the left-hand side where the men are men, very masculine, masculine gestures and body language. And the women are sort of floppy and pathetic on the right-hand side. And you’ve got the same thing here, haven’t you? You got the men, he’s being very stoical as are the Lictors carrying the bodies. And it’s the women who are emoting and flopping around on the right-hand side. There are many messages in this picture. Another one is, it’s meant to be a celebration of virtue. So you can see that Mrs. Brutus still darns her husband’s socks. I don’t what she’s doing with that sewing basket, but she’s sewing.
And that is central. Your eye goes to it. It’s central to the whole picture. So even though he’s a very important man in ancient Rome, they don’t have lots of servants doing everything for them. The furniture is extremely simple. This absolutely amazing chair just to the left of centre. I must send… I dunno if Wendy’s watching this, but yeah, I reckon that’s Wendy’s taste. several galleries that do 20th century furniture with her when she came to Paris and I reckon that she’d go straight for this if it was on sale. And it’s timeless, isn’t it? It looks so modern. Apparently David himself designed these chairs and had them made for his studio. But when you think of the typical furniture, Louis cares, Louis says, it’s fussy, florid, covered with gold and ormolu and decoration. So this is really making a statement in its simplicity. So David, he was born in 1748 and he had the luck or the misfortune, depends how you look at it, to live through interesting times as that Chinese saying, it’s a curse to live through interesting times. I’m afraid, we’re living through very interesting times at the moment. So he lived through the French Revolution, the Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Period, defeat of Napoleon, return of the old monarchy. And he changed his political views when he started off as a royalist. Then he’s a very ardent, very extreme revolutionary. He was the kind of Jeremy Corbyn of the French Revolution. He was a member of the Jacobin party and then the Jacobins fell from power and he was thrown into prison and narrowly escaped being guillotined himself. And so we’ve got two images here and the French revolution was moving at such a pace, times were changing. The painting on the right-hand side is probably the most famous image of the French Revolution. The death of Marat stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
The original version of that is now in Brussels, in the Royal Museums in Brussels. There is a version of it in the Louvre, but it is a replica rather than the original. So I won’t talk too much about it today, except just to develop this theme of rejection of the luxuriousness, the self-indulgence of the Ancien regime. So, you can see, when you think of what Louis cars Louis says desk looked like, absolutely smothered with and very, very elaborate. Whereas in this painting, you can see that Marat is using a simple packing case as a desk and you may just be able to see at the bottom it says year two, because they decided to abandon BC and AD dating back to Christ ‘cause they’d rejected Christianity, they’d rejected religion. And after the execution of Louis XVI, they decided to restart the world. So year one was 1792. The self portrait on the left, to me, this is a very romantic image. And you may think, “Ooh, romanticism, neoclassicism, aren’t they opposites?” 'Cause they’re running alongside one another. And it seems to me, even though stylistically they may be different, one does not exclude the other. What is romantic about this image? Well, for a start, his hair. He’s not wearing a powdered wig. He’s got this messy tousled hair, that romantic hairstyle. The intensity of his stare, mean, moody, complicated. He actually was in prison when he painted this self-portrait.
And as I said, he came very close to execution. So he is released and after the atrocities of the so-called terror, that’s 1792 to 1793, the guillotine, 10,000 people publicly executed in Paris, things calmed down and we have the period between the revolution and Napoleon, which is called , and it is one of those periods of relaxation. Everything’s calming down. People are beginning to feel a bit safer. Here are two portraits, Monsieur and Madame Selizia and they date from this period of the . It’s also a very famous period for the elegance of its fashions, both male and female. You can see these are very beautifully dressed, this pair, and particularly madame. She has a smiley, relaxed, and he’s got quite a relaxed expression as well. Utterly elaborate cravat. So, for me, these portraits, they really represent the mood of this period known as the were David, very, very good accessories. Love the gloves and the buttons and the flowers and so on. So then along comes Napoleon, and he has, in the 1790s, these very brilliant military campaigns in Italy and in Egypt. And he comes back to Paris in 1798. I’ve just watched “Tosca” 10 days ago, and I’m going to see it again in the Puccini Festival next week. If you remember, Napoleon’s victory at Marengo plays a very important part in the plot of Puccini’s opera “Tosca.” So it’s a great triumph and he comes back to Paris and he’s the hero of the moment. And he grants David a three-hour sitting. Napoleon hated sitting for his portrait and he never again allowed… Although David painted several subsequent portraits of Napoleon, there were none of them painted from live sittings. This is the only one by him that was. And he wrote a very gushing letter.
He said, “Oh, Bonaparte, he’s my hero. He’s my hero. He’s a God. In ancient times, people would’ve put up altars to a man.” So he’s totally one of two… Having been a royalist and a revolutionary, he’s now a Bonapartist. This painting, incidentally, not in the gallery that I’m talking about. It’s exhibited separately in the museum. Perhaps David’s most famous portrait is of Madame Recamier. She was a famous beauty and a very intelligent woman and she ran a salon in Paris. She was married to a wealthy banker, much older than her, who was rumoured to be her biological father. But she claimed that she never had sex. She didn’t like sex, but she did like displaying her delicious toes. The two famous portraits of her show her with her feet bare. And here she is reclining on a chaise lounge. David fell out with her during the sittings, partly 'cause she turned up late. He found that infuriating. But what caused him to abandon the portrait was that she commissioned another portrait by one of his pupils, a man called Baron Gerard. I’ll show you that in a minute. But the painting is very interesting to look at closely because it’s not finished. Unfinished paintings can reveal a lot about an artist’s technique. And if he’d finished it, it would’ve had a very glossy, very, very smooth finish through layer upon layer of transparent paint. But as you, you can see this detail, it’s a rather scratchy paint surface that is not the intended final paint surface.
So this is the other portrait, which I can see why she might have preferred it. It’s very sexy, isn’t it, with her little wardrobe malfunction of the sleeve dripping down off her shoulder. And once again, the bare toes and her facial expression is much sexier. It’s much more inviting. So Baron Gerard, he became a baron. He was made a baron by Napoleon. And he was, as I said, a pupil of David. And again, this very glossy, smooth style. But his drawings, his pen-and-ink drawings are wonderfully free. This one I bought in Paris about two years ago from my favourite gallery, Galerie Amicorum. It wasn’t that expensive. But you can see it’s got a tremendous spontaneity and freedom that the paintings don’t have. And the dress is a bit similar and I think it’s a similar date. So I like to fantasise an early study, possibly. Here’s another, I think, very appealing portrait by Gerard that’s in the gallery of his fellow painter, Isabey, with his little daughter and his lovely, adoring dog. Still in this neoclassical period, this is by an artist called Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, who actually, exceptionally, was not a pupil of David, but working in a very similar style. Now, so many of the paintings I’m going to show you today have a political subtext. And this is one that has one as political subtext as well. It dates from 1799. So this is, again, between the Revolution and Napoleon. So after the excesses and the violence of the revolution, as I said, things calmed down, and many people who’d gone into exile came back. But for many… Of course, it’s an experience that’s been repeated many times in history. Think of all the people who had to flee the Nazi horror and who came back to the places where they’d grown up. Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw.
And for them, it was often a very mixed and often a very bitter experience. And this was the same for the French exiles who came back after the revolution. The story, this theme is couched in a story from the ancient world, the return of Marcus Sextus from exile to Rome, only to find that his wife has just died. Another painting by Gerard here. And it’s in a style, a kind of sub genre of Neoclassicism that sometimes dubbed the . And it’s a… Ugh. It’s a slightly icky style, I would say. Erotic, but incredibly bland and smooth and idealised. The theme here is the love of Cupid and Psyche. Slightly creepy. Like this too. This is another painting in the same genre. This is by an artist called Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson. And like the previous one, it’s a mythological painting. It’s “The Sleep of Endymion.” Now Venus is accidentally wounded by an arrow from her son Cupid. And she falls in love with the mortal called Endymion. And of course, it’s embarrassing really for her to be caught out like this. But she has a very clever trick that she can put her lover into a permanent sleep and only wake him up when she needs him. I’m sure there are plenty of spouses who’d like to learn that particular trick. So he’s a very odd artist, Girodet Trioson. This paintings also in the Grand Gallery. It’s “The Death of Atala.” And I now actually find it a really quite creepy painting, I have to admit. When I was 13, I discovered a reproduction of this in a book in the school library and I could not stop looking at it. I was completely mesmerised.
And well, I can see it’s a painting that might appeal to a 13-year-old. I think it’s also very erotic, but in a slightly disturbing, kind of creepy way. So, Napoleon becomes dictator of France and in 1804, he declares himself emperor of the French and like dictators later on, Hitler, Mussolini and so on, he is very keen to mobilise French art for his own glory and to serve the purposes of his regime. And I hesitate, really, to compare Napoleon with Hitler and Mussolini because there are good sides to him. I don’t think you could… It’d be very hard to find any good of Hitler. Maybe a little bit with Mussolini. But in the end, of course, the megalomania destroyed Napoleon as well. But he did many, many good things for France. But he had forcibly abducted the Pope, Pope Pius IX. I think that is important to France. There is the Pope at the coronation of Napoleon in 1804. And then Napoleon humiliates the Pope by crowning himself. He picks up the crown, he anoints himself and he puts the crown on his own head. And we see Josephine kneeling on the ground in front of him as though, you know, she looks like she’s worshipping him. You know, she’s apparently praying, but she seems to be praying to him rather than to Jesus or the Virgin Mary. We know that David was actually present.
There’s a story about him actually coming to fisticuffs to secure his place so he could see the whole ceremony. Somebody else had taken the place assigned him, and a fight broke out between the two. It doesn’t really… You have to see this. You have to stand in front of it, I’m afraid, that this reproduction does it no justice whatsoever. But it’s interesting, I think. David thought, “Oh my God, this huge multi-figured composition. Where do I even begin with this?” And surprisingly, perhaps he went to the Louvre. One of the themes of these lectures is how the Louvre has been this archive for artists that they would go and . And you wouldn’t really have expected a neoclassical artist to go to the arch-Boroque painter, Rubens, but you can see that’s exactly what David did. He went to look at the coronation of Marie de’ Medici in the Palais de Luxembourg and it is the basis of his own composition. Here we see slightly better details from the painting, some very crisp depiction of fabrics. So David did have his finger on the pulse politically. And this is a painting which was uncannily prophetic because he began this in 1812. 1812 was really the turning point in Napoleon’s fortunes. He invaded Russia, and as we know, he was never defeated by the Russian army. He was defeated by the Russian winter. And that was to some extent the same with Hitler. Later on, somebody said the trouble with Hitler and Napoleon was that they had bad geography teachers who didn’t tell ‘em about the Russian winter. So this is another story from ancient history. Leonidas defending the past at the Themopoli, defeated by the Persian army.
And he, with a group of men, they died to the very last. So this was a theme. It proved to be uncannily prophetic of what was going to happen to the Napoleonic regime and the French army. It was exhibited in the Salon of 1814, just as the Allied armies were closing in on Paris. Here’s a better detail of the picture. In fact, Napoleon wasn’t that keen on David and the artist who he really liked and employed as a propagandist was a man called Gros, G-R-O-S, who was also ennobled, so he’s always in books, you see him as Baron Gros. And he was commissioned to paint two heroic celebrations of Napoleon’s regime. This one is of his victorious campaign in Egypt in the 1790s. He won the Battle of the pyramids. And then the army withdrew to Jaffa where a plague broke out. And many soldiers in his army died of the plague. And this shows Napoleon visiting the plague house in Jaffa. And you’ve got the dead and dying in the foreground. And you have him… This apparently employing what the English called the royal touch. That he’s reaching out his hand to touch a bubonic pustule to cure this young man as though he has superhuman qualities.
Of course this is a complete lie. None of this happened. Napoleon never visited the the plague house and he in fact treated his sick soldiers appallingly. He had many of them poisoned 'cause they were a nuisance to him. And this is the pair to that painting, which is the Battle of Eylau. This was a battle, but it took place in East Prussia in 1808 between the French Grand Army and the Russian Army. And it was an extremely… It was probably the bloodiest and most costly battle of the entire Napoleon wars for both sides. And actually, it was quite indecisive. You couldn’t really say that either side could declare victory. Once again, we have Napoleon shown as this sort of superhuman, heroic figure on the battlefield surrounded by the dead and the dying. And probably the most memorable part of this picture is the heap of dead and dying bodies in the foreground of the picture. And we’ll see that had an impact on later artists. We’ll find later echoes of it. Now, 1812. This year, this decisive year of Napoleon’s retreat at the end of the year from Moscow. It was the year that the young romantic artist, Théodore Géricault made his debut at the salon. Surprisingly, really, Géricault, now such a celebrated artist, one of the greatest French artists, only ever exhibited three pictures in his entire life. And these three pictures are all in this room in the Louvre. This is a very triumphalis picture. It shows a Napoleonic chasseur charging on the battlefield. And it must have been caught as a real sensation when this was first exhibited.
This is another painting, it was in the same salon by Baron Gros of General Murat declared King of Naples. You can see Vesuvius in the background. And obviously, the intended effect is the same of a heroic picture or heroic image of a brilliant figure on horseback. But look at the difference how… I mean, that horse looks like it’s stuffed. In fact, General Murat looks like he’s stuffed. There’s no sense of drama or movement, especially when you compare it to the wonderful shwung, the swagger of Géricault. And here we’ve got some details that show it. His fellow students called him . Rubens is cook… And this is not linear. This is painterly and there’s a wonderful, rich, vigorous paint surface. Look at that horse’s eye. It’s just amazing, isn’t it? And his next picture, also in the salon of 1814, of a wounded cavalry officer leaving the field of battle. So again, well, who knows? Did he intend this? But it’s also a picture in a way that reflects the political and military fortunes of Napoleonic regime. This is of course his most famous . This is “The Raft of the Medusa.” It’s an absolutely huge painting and it’s a political painting on many levels. You can interpret it as you wish, really. And it’s, again, such a famous image, isn’t it? My guess is that whoever gets defeated in the American elections… This painting is wheeled out again and again in elections and political campaigns. The story of a naval disaster, there was a convoy of French ships of settlers going to the west coast of Africa. And the settler ships were meant to be accompanied by a military ship under a French naval commander. And the result that the disaster resulted because at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, all these old aristocrats who’d been in exile since 1790, they all came back again and they all expected to be rewarded by the return to Bourbon monarchy.
So you had generals and admirals and top naval officers and ministers who had no experience, didn’t know what they were doing. So the aristocratic captain of this ship, the Medusa, that is accompanying the convoy was apparently completely incompetent and he got the ship wrecked on a sandbank off the coast of Africa and the ship started to break up. And I think 150 people on board were forced… So in fact, the raft was a lot bigger than one you see here. To get on a hastily-constructed raft with beams from the ship that was breaking up. There was one little boat and the aristocratic officer and his cronies got in that boat and they sailed off the land, leaving the rest of the plebs on the raft to almost certain death. I haven’t got time tonight to go through the full story with you, but it’s an absolutely extraordinary story. In the end, out of the 150, there are only 13 survivors. They were eventually picked up. This shows the moment where they see the rescue ship coming to get them. And of course it turned into a huge political scandal. So it was very, very provocative of Géricault to choose this subject and send it to the Paris of 1819. But it’s a picture, as I said, it can be read on many… So it’s got that very specific, contemporary, political meaning. But people have interpreted it in other ways. There was one historian who said, “It’s France itself that’s on the raft.” And other people say, “No, it’s not just France, it’s us. It’s the whole of humanity.” And again, you know, when you think of all the dangers of facing humanity at the moment, climate change, nuclear disaster, all sorts of political disasters, you could say, “Yeah, this is us. We are on this raft on the ocean.”
Now, a slightly younger contemporary of Géricault, this is Ingres, one of my absolute favourite artists as I declared last time. He was a pupil of David and he won the which would’ve taken him to Italy where he did eventually go and spent actually more than the statutory five years in Italy. But before he went to Italy, he painted three portraits of the Riviere family that I’d are generally considered amongst his greatest masterpieces. This is his Monsieur Riviere and people often say to me, “Oh, his portraits are photographic.” Well, yes and no. In some ways they’re very un-photographic, yet they’re photographic in the sense that they’ve got this very licked paint surface. You don’t see individual brushstrokes and also in the sharpness of the detail. Although I would say that there aren’t many photographs where you get detail as sharp as you do in the paintings of Ingres. And his fantastic ability to depict silk. And that velvet cushion that Madame Riviere is lolling against. You really feel you could stroke it and you know what it would feel like. So… And also there’s in Ingres, there’s a very abstract element if you look for it. And I think the clue, on the left-hand side, on the desk in amongst the books, you can see there’s a print with a circular image and it’s a print… There you see the detail at the top. The painting on the left is Rafael’s Madonna della Sedia, Madonna of the chair. And when he was 11 years old, he first saw that picture and it became a lifetime obsession with him. And I think there are two reasons for this. One is that Rafael, again, it’s very real. It’s a young mother with her baby, but it’s also a very abstract picture. If you notice how all the lines, all the contours in the picture are circular and they’re all echoing the circular shape of the frame.
And Madame Riviere, she has an ovoid frame. And again, if you look at the picture, all the lines, her arms, her fingers, her shoulders, her whole body, it’s like a whole… It’s like a… Every line seems to be echoing the ovoid shape of the frame. This is their young daughter. I’m going to move on quickly. Now, this is at the end of the gallery. This is the Grande Odalisque. Because Ingres became the great rival of Delacroix and the Delacroix represented romanticism, colour, painterly, . Ingres represented classicism and linearity. And the followers of Ingres said, “Oh, Delacroix can’t draw.” And the followers of Delacroix said, “Oh, Ingres, he paints in grey. He can’t colour.” That’s so untrue. Ingres, actually, to me, is every bit as great a colorist as Delacroix. He’s got an incredible ability to set one colour against another to make them sing. And that peacock blue and the mustard yellow and the little splashes of red, they’re singing together in this picture. This was a commission from Caroline Murat. She was Queen of Naples and she bought it. She commissioned it from Ingres to be a present to her husband, General Murat, the king of Naples. Murat, this is kind of an odd idea, really. And in fact, because of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, they never got the picture. And instead, Ingres exhibited it at the Salon where it had a mixed reception. There was a doctor who wrote a letter to that she had anatomical problems. There were too many vertebrae in her back. I would say that’s the least of her anatomical problems actually. You ask yourself, is that leg on the far side even attached to the body? And does she have any bones? You know, you feel you could sort of stretch her. You know, she’s kind of got this kind of rubbery, boneless quality.
There was also a scandalous rumour that the Queen of Naples had posed for this picture herself. And Ingres, very indignantly denied that. He said, no, this was a 13-year-old girl that he found in Rome. Well, that’s a bit hard to believe as well, isn’t it? Does she look 13? Well, I mean, she’s so actually remote from any real human anatomy that I think it’s actually irrelevant who posed for her. The other secret here is… I said there were two reasons that Ingres was fascinated by the Madonna of the Chair. And that was the formal side, the combination of realism and abstraction. But also there was a secret sexual obsession that he had with this picture. The Madonna became his erotic fantasy. And I think in pretty well all his most erotic nudes, I’m convinced, in the back of his brain, he was actually fantasising about having sex with the Madonna of the Chair. And these two most famous nudes that are in the Louvre. You know, she’s wearing this kind of headdress that is very similar to the Madonna della Sedia. Now his great art rival, a little bit younger, Eugene Delacroix, made his debut at the Salon with this picture, “The Barque of Dante” in 1822. And he’s, as I said, the arch romantic. But this painting perhaps not altogether mature work, but interesting borrowings that go into this painting that you might not expect, that for the muscular back on the right-hand side is really almost a direct copy in reverse of one of the most famous sculptures of classical antiquity, The Torso Belvedere. And although Delacroix had not been to Rome at this point, the academy in Europe had a plaster cast of The Torso Belvedere so I think that’s where he got this from.
But he was also looking at Rubens. Rubens was one of his greatest heroes and these wonderful drops of water. That’s Delacroix top left. Rubens bottom right. He’s inspired by this brilliant way that Rubens gives you an illusion of a glistening drop of water just by laying touches of the brush side by side. He reaches full maturity in 1824 with this picture of the Massacre of Chios. This is during the Greek War of Independence when the inhabitants of the Greek island Chios revolted against the Turkish occupation. And that rebellion was put down with terrifying, terrible brutality by the Turks. Tens of thousands of Greeks were slaughtered and the western world was very shocked, and that’s what inspired this painting. It’s more than just… It’s actually one of only three paintings by Delacroix inspired by contemporary political events. And I don’t think he was a particularly political artists, unlike many others in 19th-century France. He had a very dark side of his character and was fascinated, unhealthily perhaps, with cruelty. But you could see this painting is really more than about the Greek War of Independence. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. In the same salon, we get the first great confrontation of Ingres and Delacroix. Ingres on the right-hand side, “The Vow of Louis XIII.” That’s a painting which is not in the Louvre because it was commissioned by the cathedral in Montauban in the southwest of France. So both artists, again, looking, inspired by the past, obviously, Delecroix by Rubens and Ingres obsessed throughout his career with Raphael.
And you can see this painting is almost a pastiche of two famous Madonnas by Raphael, the Dresden Madonna on the left and I’ve got a detail of Madonna of Foligno in the middle. Next confrontation of Delacroix and Ingres was in the salon of 1827. And these are, in a way, manifesto pictures of romanticism. “Death of Sardanapalus” on the left by Delecroix and “The Apotheosis of Homer.” I love Ingres so much that it pains me to say, I think in both these confrontations at the salon, it’s clear that Delacroix comes out on top. I mean, that is actually a pretty terrible picture, the Ingres. It’s a kind of school photograph, isn’t it? Ingres, a wonderful artist, but absolutely incapable, really, of an effective multi-figure composition whereas it comes so naturally to Delacroix. Here it is in the gallery. Inspired by Baron. Horrible story. Again, his fascination with human cruelty and violence. This is an oriental despot who’s been defeated in battle and he knows he’s going to die. So he commits suicide, he preempts his execution, but he wants his favourite wives and his favourite horses all to be slaughtered before he dies. And that’s what’s happening in this picture. We won’t bother with the Ingres. The Delacroix… I searched the internet. I couldn’t find any really high-quality images. New images. It’s just being returned to view after having been cleaned and restored and it really does look stunning. This is an image I found of it being taken down to be taken away and be cleaned and looking rather dirty in details. “Liberty Leading the People.” This is the most famous of his three political pictures inspired by contemporary events. And this is inspired by the revolution of 1830, where the old Bourbon regime was replaced by all parliamentary democracy of Louis Philippe.
And it shows Liberty on the barricades. God, I think of this so often because every weekend, there’s kind of mini revolution in Paris. I’m surprised there haven’t been any… I suppose there’s been such a clamp down during the Olympics. But you know, they love to throw up barricades. They love to riot. That’s a very Parisian thing. In this picture, Delacroix is believed to be… It’s the self portrait of this young man with the gun. The most sort of shocking element in the picture really is of the naked and semi-naked corpses in the foreground. I think he’s looking back again to Baron Gros, the Battle of Eylau here. And the other borrowing is from the recently-discovered Venus DeMilo, the Venus of Melos, which had been brought back to France and was in… He’s given her back her arms that the revolution in 1830. Another very famous, very celebrated painting by Delacroix is the Women of Algiers, which was shown at the Salon of 1834. Oceans of ink had been spilled over this picture. It’s one of the most intensely-discussed pictures of the 19th century. And it had a huge influence on later French art, 19th and 20th century. And it resulted from a trip two years earlier that Delacroix had made across North Africa. I mentioned the Jewish wedding last time. This is of course a fantasy because he never got into a Muslim household to see Muslim women in a harem.
This is a complete fantasy picture, but it is nevertheless very indebted to his experiences in North Africa. He was very much taken… Well, he was taken by the beauty and the dignity of the people. He was taken by… He was fascinated by the light, the intensity of the light. And he noticed for the first time that shadows are not brown or black, that shadows are full of colour. And if you look in the details of this… And you can see, he’s become very interested in colour theory and the expressiveness of colour. And he likes putting complimentary colours next to one another red and green and so on. And this is one of the most famous details of this painting, very difficult to photograph, of the green pyjamas or whatever they are of this concubine. That if you look very carefully in the shadows, you can see touches of red in the shadow 'cause red is the complimentary of green. So this is the last masterpiece of Delacroix that’s in the Louvre because he went on to paint the amazing murals in the Church of Santo Piece. But this, again, it’s a painting from history and it’s another painting that I think shows his preoccupation with man’s in humanity to man and the darker side of human nature. And this shows the taking of Constantinople during the Crusades by the Crusaders in 1204. I mean, it’s not a glorious episode about this. I know you’ve had lectures recently or maybe it was one on the Crusades. So the crusaders got to Constantinople and they took the city and they raped and pillaged and slaughtered the Jewish population. And it’s generally… And I don’t think Delacroix is… He’s not glorifying it. He’s showing it how it was. And I think that’s where I… Oh.
I’ll just show you two more pictures actually, 'cause I’ve got two more. The last major artist represented in the Louvre before the second half of 19th century, which we’ll see when we get to the Musée d'Orsay in a couple of weeks time. This is an artist called Paul Delaroche and he’s often considered to be the first of what the French call pompier. Pompier means fireman, but it’s their abusive term for the academic artists of the mid to late 19th century. Very slick, rather mechanical technique. These are stories from history, but these are not history paintings as would’ve been understood in the late 18th or the beginning of the 19th century. They’re really enlarged historical anecdotes, historical genre pictures. And there is a big fascination throughout Europe at this time in Tudor and Stuart history. And this is the story of the little princes in the tower. And it’s very cinematic. It’s really like a TV drama. You stand in front of this picture and you read it and you get involved in the story. You are these two sweet little boys and they’re saying their prayers before they go to sleep. And the little dog has his ears pricked up and you can see his shadow under the door on the left. And this is the nasty man who’s come to murder the little princes. And this, again, from Tudor history is the death of Queen Elizabeth. But I’m going to go into the Q&A now.
Q&A and Comments:
Oh, revolution of 1848 began in February. Yes, but the really important were the July days. So that was the height of the revolution in July. You’re correct that it began in February.
He seems to be left handed. I think that’s probably 'cause it’s a mirror image.
Q: How and where were the David paintings with many subjects painted?
A: He models though he would’ve drawn… Professional models will have come to his studio, would’ve been a studio big enough to accommodate the paintings and he would’ve drawn them nude to understand the body underneath the clothing before he put the clothing on them.
Q: Why did Singer Sergeant’s painting cause so much fuss?
A: Do you know, Patricia, I wish… I’ve asked that question many, many times. I simply… And especially when you see what was around that Sergeant painting in 1884 at the Paris Salon. Really unbelievably explicit, sexy paintings. The Salon was absolutely full of them. So why a strap slipped down her shoulder caused all that fuss… I lived most of my life in France and I’m still mystified by many aspects of French culture. I mean, I have a painting in my Paris flat that was in my house in London, which has got some quite explicit elements in it. It was in my house in London for 10 years and nobody even mentioned it. And so many French women who came to my flat looked at the painting . “You just cannot show that painting,” that I actually put up a curtain to cover it up when I get French visitors.
Q: Was there any overlap in the dates of Rococo painting?
A: Yes, there’s a big overlap. You know, it’s very rarely the case that one style will start and another one will finish simultaneously. I mean, Fragonard lived into the 19th century. He died in 1806, so… And The Swing is 1768. So Neoclassical painting has already got going when he painted The Swing. Bobby, the paintings of this period seem to focus almost exclusively on social and political upheavals with very little attention to personal, intimate, private life. That’s because of the… That’s not altogether… I’m sure I’ve given you that impression today because I was looking at those big paintings from the salon. But of course there are plenty of other artists . What we saw… Some of that was last week in the upstairs galleries.
Thank you, Sharon. Thank you very much Lorna as well.
And yes, of course Paris. I mean, it is amazing what you can still find in Paris in the flea markets. There’s lots of opportunities for people on a modest budget to buy beautiful things.
Yeah, Liberty’s breasts, they are rather sculptural, aren’t they? Well they’re based on the sculpture. Not very fleshy.
Delacroix was a very… Herbert, yes. The answer to that is, Delacroix was a huge influence on the Impressionists and the post-impressionists and on Matisse. He’s a major influence on French art for the next century. All these violent scenes of chaos and death, there’s an absence of the blood and gore one would expect to avoid the revulsion. Actually, it’s not always true. There are some pretty gory, revolting things, believe me, amongst these paintings. But you’ve got a point there. I mean, it’s interesting, for instance, with The Raft of Medusa that in the final painting, Géricault holds back on the horror. I mean, he made all the studies for that painting, including studies of seven and so on. And he’d actually studied people dying in hospital. But very little of that actually gets into the painting. I think he just would’ve thought it was inappropriate to paint it on that scale and show it in the Salon.
Thank you Stella. And thank you Donna. And it’s very nice for you and it’s very encouraging for you to say all these nice things.
Q: Have I seen… Been inside the Luxembourg palace?
A: No. Have you? I don’t know how easy it is. There’re always these special days up there in the autumn when you can get inside these French buildings. So the murals in the library at the Luxembourg. Yes, I of course know them from reproduction, but I’ve never seen the originals.
Q: Were assistants used to help paint the huge complex paintings?
A: Yes, but not to the same degree that they had been by Rubens, for instance, or certain old master paintings. Now in the 19th century, it was generally considered that an artist should be responsible for the whole thing. But I’m sure that they did use assistants as well.
And thank you, Barbara. Thank you very much.
I’m off next week 'cause I’ll be in Luca for the Puccini Festival, but I’ll be back for my final Louvre lecture, the Sunday after next. Thank you. Bye-Bye. Enjoy the summer.