4

STEPHEN BANN
Paul Delaroche acquired unmatched
celebrity as a painter in the first half of the
nineteenth century. His major paintings,
including The Execution of Lady Jane Grey,
The Princes in the Tower and The Young
Christian Martyr, achieved widespread
recognition. His vast semi-circular work
depicting Artists of all Ages at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, completed in 1841, extended
his fame throughout Europe. As an Italian
critic remarked in 1853, he was ‘at the
summit of all living painters’. Delaroche’s
fame in his own lifetime has been followed
by almost total neglect in the twentieth
century.
Overshadowed since his death by his
contemporaries Delacroix and Ingres,
Delaroche is now emerging as an exemplary
representative of the times that successively
saw the European-wide development of
historical genre painting, and the dawning of
the so-called ‘age of mechanical
reproduction’. His much quoted comment
on the invention of photography, that ‘from
today painting is dead’, can now be
appreciated not as a thoughtless dismissal,
but as an indication of his deep involvement
in the revolutionary transformation of visual
culture which took place during his lifetime.
In this handsomely illustrated book, Stephen
Bann redresses the imbalance of scholarship
on Delaroche. It is the first monograph
devoted to Delaroche, and examines the
artist’s career from his earliest history
paintings to his later, more experimental
works that were influenced by photography.
This book also offers the first detailed
analysis of Delaroche’s major works in the
context of the visual culture of the early
nineteenth century.
The publication of Paul Delaroche: History
Painted coincides with the bicentenary of
Delaroche’s birth in 1797 and will initiate a
widespread reappraisal of his significance as
an artist.

Over 165 illustrations, with 35 in full colour.

£40.00 RRP in UK only

Ue ARO CEE
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/pauldelarochehisOOO0Obann
PAUL DELAROCHE
HISTORY PAINTED

T29

Se Reine AINYN

?
REAKTION BOOKS
This painter has no great predilection for
the past in itself, but for its representation,
for the illustration of its spirit, and for
writing history in colours.

Heinrich Heine, The Salon (1831)

 Preface and Acknowledgements

CREO

F THERE were an index that measured the past celebrity of painters as a function of their
lI
present neglect, Paul Delaroche would probably come close to the top of the scale. He has
paid for his fame in France and the rest of Europe during the second quarter of the nineteenth
century by being almost completely ignored from 1860 to the present day. Unlike so many of
his contemporaries of comparatively minor reputation, he was not thought to merit a compen-
dious biography in the later years of the century. By far the most substantial scholarly publica-
tion devoted to him in the present century is an American PhD thesis, presented in 1974, which
has remained up to now virtually the only authority worth taking into account on most matters
concerning his career.
This unusual situation cannot really be explained by either the inaccessibility or the loss of
his major works. In addition to the large paintings consistently displayed at the Louvre, and the
timely retrieval of another — perhaps his best-known outside France — by the National Gallery
in London, there are substantial holdings of his work at two major galleries, which are com-
mitted to keeping them on display: the Wallace Collection, London, and the Chateau de Chan-
tilly. A number of his works, some of them important, have indeed been destroyed or mislaid.
But this circumstance, which of course applies to other early nineteenth-century French
painters too, is more than offset by the existence of a catalogue raisonné of his major work, pub-
lished two years after his death by Jules Godde. This catalogue holds what must be the first
photographic survey of the production of a painter or near-contemporary artist of any kind.
The English photographer Robert Jefferson Bingham had perfected the technique of photo-
graphing images, from the small print or drawing to the largest painting, and Delaroche’s
print editor, Adolphe Goupil, had financed the costly publication.
Delaroche’s very proximity to the world of printmaking and photography may alert us to one
plausible explanation for the decline of his reputation in the course of the nineteenth century,
and the potential interest that he offers now. Credited apocryphally with the exclamation — on
seeing his first daguerreotype — that ‘from today painting is dead’, Delaroche was the very aca-
demician to whom Arago turned for an authoritative opinion on the artistic validity of Daguer-
re’s invention in 1839. He was also one of the painters whose reputation suffered most when
‘touch’ — the very property of oil technique that photography could not simulate — became the
primary identifying sign of Modernist experiment.
Yet this study does not simply attempt to present Delaroche as an artist left stranded at the

Lo]
 PAW ED EAR OG

dividing line between ‘mechanical’ and ‘painterly’ reproduction. It seeks to establish that the
history of French painting between the collapse of the school of David and the emergence of
\ianet and his Modernist colleagues in the 1850s is incomplete without an account of Dela-
roche’s artistic development. The argument is decidedly not the type of pleading that has
often been made, over the past few decades, for the validity of so-called pompier painting side
by side with work that posterity has capriciously singled out for attention. Delaroche is not just
the pompier for whom equity demands a little credit after we have sated ourselves on Delacroix
and Ingres. By any account a less complete artist than either of his great contemporaries, Dela-
roche indicates through his very limitations, as well as his not infrequent successes, the devel-
oping role of painting in visual culture, which their overwhelming achievement can serve to
camouflage. History, like Nature, abhors a vacuum. A new attention to Delaroche by the art
historian makes the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy in France seem rather
less like a vacancy traversed by comets.
To serve this purpose a special focus on the reading of all of Delaroche’s most important
paintings has been necessary. This is not however a comprehensive study of the critical recep-
tion of his major works — an enterprise made all the more difficult by the fact that, up to 1837,
every Salon critic wrote about him, and that, after 1837, when he withdrew permanently from
the Salon, his work was scarcely seen except by patrons, pupils and friends. My aim has rather
been to take into account a wide variety of contemporary sources for his life, published and un-
published, laying special emphasis on the small number of biographical essays that attempt to
consider the course of his work as a whole. These include, in pride of place, the sympathetic but
by no means uncritical estimate of his pupil and friend, Henri Delaborde, and the judicious
account of his career, clearly the fruit of much personal contact, published by the musician
Halevy in his capacity as secretary of the Academie des Beaux-Arts. Other more wayward but
intermittently useful biographical sketches are provided by Alexandre Dumas, who 1s cheer-
fully hostile, and Eugene de Mirecourt, who has the best stock of anecdotes.
The reading of the major paintings in terms of their themes, structures and strategies has at
the same time been the primary end in view throughout this study. Up to now, there has been
virtually no attempt to trace the emergence of Delaroche’s paintings in terms of the successive
sketches that predated them, and the replicas and prints that followed them, a situation that is
not only truly surprising but has given rise to considerable confusion. Drawings after the study
lithographs based on Delaroche’s paintings have, for example, been confused with preliminary
sketches for those paintings, in more than one major museum. My main purpose is not to
clarify, in detail, sequences involving several different media, spread over a long period of
time. But I hope to show that some of Delaroche’s best-known images, such as the Princes in
the Tower and Jane Grey, have a history that illuminates not only their own identity as images
but also their pervasive effect in other domains of visual culture.
It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the help that I have received, in charting this relatively
unknown field, from those who have generously shared their expertise with me. Stephen
Duffy, who as curator at the Wallace Collection has charge of the best range of Delaroche’s
work outside France, has been endlessly helpful in responding to my queries and suggesting

[10 |
 PRE BeAUGeE,

new directions. Ralf Jaglin and Nicolas Milovanovic, working on graduate theses at the Free
University of Berlin and University of Paris IV respectively, have given me useful ideas from
the material of their own research. I have also profited from the opportunity to learn at first
hand from the knowledge of those whose acquaintance with the adjacent areas of French nine-
teenth-century painting is much more extensive than my own: in particular, Michael Fried,
Marc Gotlieb, Francis Haskell, Jon and Linda Whiteley. Although I have not met him, |
should include in this group Dr Norman Ziff, whose PhD thesis, presented in 1974, was an
indispensable sheet anchor: though I have specified on occasions the points on which I differ
from him, it would be impossible to record adequately the debt to his thorough work of doc-
umentation.
In attempting to see as much of Delaroche’s surviving work as possible (a good proportion
of it having resurfaced in the years since Ziff wrote), I have been considerably helped by the
courtesy and cooperation of staff from a number of galleries, print rooms and archives: in
particular, Claude Cosneau (of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes); Marie-Cecile Miessner
(of the Departement des Estampes, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris); Stephen Coppel (of the
Prints and Drawings Department, British Museum); Regis Michel (of the Departement des
Arts Graphiques, Louvre, Paris); Edward Morris (of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool);
Marie Pessiot (of the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rouen); Charles Nugent (of the Whitworth
Art Gallery, Manchester); Emmanuel Starcky (of the Musée Magnin, Dijon); Chantal
Rouquet (of the Musee de Troyes); Jean-Luc Dauphin (of the Societe d'Histoire et d’Archeo-
logie of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne); Michel Defossez (of the Societe Archeologique et Historique
of Avesnes-sur-Helpe); Martine Bailleux-Delbecq (of the Musee Louis-Philippe, Eu);
Fabienne Queyroux (of the Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France); and (last but by no means
least) Annick Bergeon and Helene Lafont-Couturier (of the Musee Goupil, Bordeaux). In
addition, I received useful answers to my nagging letters from Dr Anthony Hamber (Chris-
tie’s International), Marian Campbell (Victoria and Albert Museum), Michael Pritchard and
Sir Michael Levey.
This list would not be complete, however, if I did not also acknowledge the aid of those who,
by enabling me to combine research on Delaroche with other academic engagements, made
access to documents and works of art considerably simpler: Professor Jan-Gunnar Sjélin (De-
partment of History of Art, University of Lund); Dr Wolfgang Ernst (Forschungsschwerpunkt
Literaturwissenschaft, Berlin); Laurence Vanpoulle (Grand Public, Dijon); and Theo Gritter
(Folkwang Museum, Essen). I owe a special debt to Henri-Claude Cousseau, whose invitation
to lecture on the Childhood ofPico della Mirandola at Nantes rekindled my interest in Dela-
roche’s paintings, and to Mieke Bal, whose Point of Theory conference at the University of Am-
sterdam enabled me to return to the subject, discovering in the process that so much more
remained to be said. Michael Fried and Marc Gotlieb, whom I have already mentioned, also
provided the public forum for the initial, highly rewarding presentation of some of the
guiding ideas of this book. But perhaps I would never have known precisely where to begin if
Maurizio and Franca Ascari had not invited me to visit with them, at the end of June 1996, the
Monastery and Hermitage of Camaldoli.

[1]
 PAUL DELAROCHE

My final thanks are to the University of Kent, whose generous study leave provision made it
possible for me to complete the text, and to the staffofReaktion Books, as always long-suffering
and creative in their approach to book production.

[12]
 Introduction: Rise and Fall ofa Reputation

R29

N 17 september 1834, at one o’clock in the morning, the Grand Duke Leopold I of
Tuscany arrived at the ancient monastery of Camaldoli, high in the Apennines, with a
suite which included his second secretary and court painter, Angidini. The primary reason was
to settle a troublesome dispute over the monks’ entitlement to cut wood in this beautiful but
often inhospitable area. But the Grand Duke’s curiosity was also aroused by the presence in
the nearby Hermitage — the Sacro Eremo di Camaldoli — of a group of four Frenchmen who
had already spent over six weeks as guests of the monks.’ He was impressed to discover, on
being introduced to them by the prior, that one of the Frenchmen was a painter decorated
with the Legion @honneur.

1 Pierre-Jean David, called David d’Angers, Portrait medallion of Paul

Delaroche, 1832, bronze.

Halévy recounts this little incident in his sympathetic essay on Paul Delaroche in order to
stress the painter’s lack of self-importance. Undoubtedly it was Delaroche who told him that
he was under the impression that the magnet for the Grand Duke’s visit had been his own
artistic fame: he was mildly surprised to find that it had not so far managed to cross the Alps,
or at least to reach the Grand Duke.
Yet it was perhaps not unreasonable for Delaroche to imagine that, even in a remote part ofa
foreign country, his fame would have accompanied him. In the ten years since he had exhibited

[13|
 PAW DE IASR O1G re

his Joan of Arc at the Salon of 1824, he had received public acclaim and official distinction to a
far greater degree than any painter of his generation. He was barely twenty-seven when the
Salon of 1824 began to receive public notices and from that very point, in Mirecourt’s words,
‘he secured his place among the most celebrated artists of the century’. In a decade when the
number of artists exhibiting continued to grow exponentially, and the Salons became more and
more frequent, Delaroche scarcely seemed to put a foot wrong.’ With the Death ofElizabeth,
shown in 1827, and the Crommell, shown in 1831, he developed and consolidated a type of his-
torical painting on a grand scale, which led to the emergence of awholly new genre, the genre
historique, at the 1833 Salon.* Before he left for Italy in June 1834, he had had the satisfaction of
seeing his Lady Jane Grey achieve an unparalleled popular impact at the Salon that took place
during the winter and spring months. ‘Not for many years, exclaimed the Magasin pittoresque,
‘has a work of art achieved a greater popular success than the Jane Grey??
Yet Delaroche’s ability to pull in the crowds had proved no bar to official recognition by the
governments and by his peers. The ribbon of the Legion @honneur had been awarded to him in
1828 by the Bourbon monarchy: he had however been promoted to the superior grade of officier
shortly before leaving Paris, on the completion of the oil version of his Duc de Guise, commis-
sioned by the eldest son of King Louis-Philippe.° The early years of the July Monarchy had also
seen his election to the Institut, as a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts — at barely thirty-
five, the youngest person ever to be appointed to that august and restricted body.’ In October
1833, his potential for training the young painters of the Romantic generation was confirmed
when he was appointed Professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
The lengthy stay at Camaldoli in the summer of 1834 must have been an unequalled oppor-
tunity to look back over this strikingly successful decade of activity, while laying the foundations
for an extension of his career. The only record of these weeks in the Apennines, apart from the
two signatures that he leaves in the guest book of the monastery, 1s the series of portraits of the
Camaldoline monks, singular in their clarity and psychological intensity, which Delaroche gave
to his friend Alphonse de Feltre (illus. 64). But the entire Italian journey, of which this stay was
the first sustained episode, implied for Delaroche little less than a visit to the sources of Western
painting, at Florence, Pisa, Arezzo, Siena and, finally, Rome. He had set off after making the
first sketches for a monumental project that would set the seal upon his reputation. The great
church of La Madeleine in Paris, whose architecture and sculpture had been finally completed
in the same year, was to receive a series of large frescoes illustrating the life of Saint Mary Mag-
dalene. The Italian journey was the result of this commission, which Delaroche believed to be
securely in his grasp. For such an ambitious project, surpassing in prestige even the triumphs of
the Salon, it was necessary, in Halevy’s words, to ‘fortify his spirit’ with beautiful images of the
early Renaissance period: ‘to take as guides in the difficult path which he was to follow the naive
and austere masters whose memory he invoked’.
Yet Delaroche’s Italian journey, so judiciously planned with the aim of taking his art in a new
and fertile direction, had two quite unanticipated results. On the one hand, it enabled him to
enjoy the hospitality at the Villa Médicis of the Director of the French Academy in Rome,
Horace Vernet, whose friendship and encouragement he had already enjoyed as a young

[14]
 Sha N Dea LOR IA kn? Oo LAT TON

painter. A few years previously Delaroche had sketched a portrait of Vernet’s daughter, Louise,
a young woman universally admired for her beauty and intelligence. In the autumn of 1834,
their acquaintance blossomed, and on 28 January 1835 Paul Delaroche and Louise Vernet
were married in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. The second outcome of the stay in
Rome was a less happy one. Delaroche was working on large studies for the Mary Magdalene
cycle when he received the news that the terms of his commission had been arbitrarily changed,
and the younger painter Jules-Claude Ziegler was to be allotted the apse, which was by any
standard the most impressive space that the Madeleine could offer.’ He returned rapidly to
Paris and, on ascertaining that the decision had been made, decided to withdraw entirely from
the commission. He did so, indeed, with a certain bravura, throwing down his advance of
25,000 francs on the desk of M. Thiers, who had in all likelihood not only informed him of
the change but also been responsible for taking the decision."°
Alexandre Dumas assures us in his brief memoir that the episode of the Madeleine commis-
sion was a turning-point in Delaroche’s life: ‘Delaroche’s sadness, or to put it better, his misan-
thropy, date from this very day”"’ Whether or not we accept the judgement — and in all events it
has to be set against the fact that Delaroche was then beginning his decade of happy married life
with Louise Vernet — it is clear that the ensuing phase of Delaroche’s career was to be very dif-
ferent in character from the uninterrupted ascent of the years 1824 to 1834. Having lost one
large-scale commission, he quite soon acquired another of a very different type, though hardly
less prestigious. From around 1834, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts had been engaged in constructing
a splendid new building on the site where Alexandre Lenoir had created his Musee des Monu-
ments Francais. Most impressive of all the interior spaces was a large, semicircular auditorium,
intended for the distribution of prizes, the decoration of which was entrusted to Delaroche, and
completed between the years 1837 and 1841. But this was the only public display of his talents to
which Delaroche lent himself at this stage of his career. After 1837, he ceased to exhibit in the
Salon. Resentment at the growing power and virulence of the critics, which was widely held
responsible for the suicide of Delaroche’s master, Gros, in 1835, must have played a major
part in his decision. A critic such as Theophile Gautier, indeed, would set out with relish to
destroy the reputation that Delaroche himself had built up over the years. He had already
given notice of this intention in 1835, in the superbly insolent Preface to Mademoiselle de
Maupin, where Delaroche is held to epitomize modern bathos: ‘A few centuries ago, we had
Raphael, we had Michelangelo; now we have M. Paul Delaroche, and all because we are
making progress.’
The Italian journey of 1834/35 therefore marks, in a real sense, the apogee of Delaroche’s
career. Up to that time, he managed to reconcile, to an extraordinarily successful degree, great
popular acclaim with informed critical approval, just as he was able to attract consistent support
from public and private patrons. The Bourbon family had commissioned paintings from him
during the Restoration, and the change of dynasty after the July Revolution of 1830 in no way
interrupted his period of favour, although the family of Louis-Philippe now had to compete
with the pronounced appetite for his paintings displayed by such rich connoisseurs as the
Comte de Pourtalés and the Russian Count (subsequently Tuscan Prince) Anatole Demidoff."°

1Lmalwn|a
 PA WE Din
EA AG ORC

The successive salons up to and including 1835, with an ever-increasing volume of criticism
devoted to them by the French press, did not spare Delaroche the occasional adverse
comment. But the balance ofopinion was altogether in his favour. Occasional writers on art of
the calibre of Stendhal and Heine showed themselves to be captivated by the novel aspects of
his work.
The artist who emerges, both in public and in private life, over the next two decades is much
more difficult to characterize. Delaroche certainly experienced great personal distress when his
young wife died at the end of 1845, and in the years before his own death in 1856 his health
declined considerably. His withdrawal from the much-pondered project for the Madeleine
was, no doubt, compensated to some extent by the opportunity of the Hemicycle des Beaux-
Arts. He achieved great success as a teacher when he took over the studio of his master, Gros,
in 1835, and kept it open as a thriving institution for the next eight years. But it was well known
that he aspired to the post of Director the French Academy at Rome, once occupied by his
father-in-law, Horace Vernet, and this mark of official favour continually eluded him.'*
Against the chequered pattern of Delaroche’s later life, however, one thing 1s eminently clear.
Although he had foregone the public test of the annual Salon, he was not for that reason any less
persistent and productive as a painter. In the words of the biographer closest to him, Henri De-
laborde: ‘He became acquainted with success at an early stage; but success neither sapped his
strength nor led his reason astray.’> After Strafford and Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers of
Cromivell, both exhibited at the 1837 Salon, he composed no more large-scale historical genre
pictures. He appears to have relied more and more heavily on the assistance of his students to
complete the occasional large-scale commissions, such as Charlemagne Crossing the Alps (1847),
to which he was bound." But the single decade of his happy married life allowed him to develop
a new idiom, modelled broadly on Raphael but anticipating Symbolism in its oneiric intensity,
of which the Childhood of Pico della Mirandola (1842) and Herodias (1843) are prime examples.
The last few years of his life saw the gradual development of a mode of religious painting almost
without precedent in its understated pathos, and even Gautier paid tribute to its strikingly
original use of light.'7
Delaroche’s continued productivity over these years, in which there was no regular public
occasion to view his work, accounts in large part for the fact that, after his death in 1856, a retro-
spective exhibition of his work was arranged at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and, as a direct conse-
quence of this public showing, a catalogue raisonné illustrated by photographs was published by
the print editor Goupil. It would be hard to overestimate the significance, in institutional terms,
of this conjuncture. In spite of earlier shows ofa similar kind held at the British Institution, it was
sufficiently ambitious in its scope to qualify as the first complete retrospective exhibition of an
artist’s work, in the sense to which we have become accustomed. It was generated with the
support of the most distinguished living artists in France, including Ingres, Delacroix, Horace
Vernet and Ary Scheffer.'* These, among others, put their signatures to the statement that:
The friends and pupils of M. Paul Delaroche have conceived the thought of making a public exhibition
of his works, which seemed to them necessarily to be at once the finest homage to his memory and a real
service to render to art. This thought was received by a unanimous feeling of approval and interest.

|16 |
 Ry be AUN ED PA OB AG Rak Phu ATT ON

The great artist, becoming each year more severe towards himself, had for a number of years with-
drawn from competition in which his progress could have been appreciated by all. The exhibition of
his pictures will thus almost have the interest of novelty.'”

Although the exhibition was a huge popular success, and the catalogue raisonné (being depen-
dent on the costly process of photography) limited to a very few examples for collectors, it is
important to see the two developments together. Goupil had enlisted the skills of the English
photographer Robert Jefferson Bingham, who was a pioneer in the process of photographing
works of art, from engravings to full-scale paintings: he even included in the catalogue an
image of the vast drawing for Napoleon at Saint Helena (illus. 155) which had been traced in
charcoal on the walls of Delaroche’s studio, and for that reason could only be ‘ephemeral’.*°
The conclusion to be drawn from this spate of activity after Delaroche’s death is a challenging
one. The painter who had conspicuously refrained from showing at the annual Salon had had
his works consecrated by a system that would eventually relegate the Salon tradition to relative
unimportance: that of the personal retrospective exhibition covering an artist’s entire career,
and, mirroring the totality of the retrospective, that of the illustrated catalogue or monograph,
which perpetuates the assembly of works in a readily accessible form.
Was it simply a fortunate accident that Delaroche should have been the first to benefit from
this dual recognition?*' It may seem so. But the painter whose many vanished works have been
saved from oblivion by Bingham’s excellent contemporary photographs was also the painter
who gave Daguerre’s invention its official artistic accreditation, when he compiled a special
report on the daguerreotype at the request of Arago in 1839.°* Much more will be said at a
later stage in this study of the special significance of Delaroche’s relationship to photography.
It is a complex, indeed contentious relationship, as is aptly conveyed by the fact that Delaroche’s
judgement on photography was not exhausted by the official report but also found expression in
his notorious remark, ‘from today painting is dead’. Even if the remark is apocryphal, it
becomes revealing in the context of Delaroche’s later religious paintings, which engage pro-
foundly with the implications of photography on an ontological rather a merely technical level.
However Delaroche’s engagement with photography must itself be seen in the context of a
wider preoccupation with the techniques of diffusion and reproduction, to which his close links
with the editor Goupil bear witness. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that Delaroche
was the most extensively reproduced artist of his age, in France and possibly elsewhere.
Moreover, his major work came at the right time to benefit from the final flowering in the art
of reproductive engraving, which was to be annihilated, in just a few years, by the arrival of
photographic technology. In two cases, at least, Delaroche’s paintings gave rise to reproductive
engravings that mark a kind of absolute within the conditions of the technique. Lady Jane Grey,
consigned to the engraver Paul Mercuri shortly after its showing in the Salon of 1834, was com-
pleted only for the retrospective exhibition of 1857, although both the editors and the engraver
were in active correspondence about the progress of the image for much of that lengthy
period.** Henriquel-Dupont’s tripartite engraving of the Hemicycle, which occupied a mere
eight years of his life, was widely regarded as the most perfect example of the use of the burin,
without acid or any other form of ancillary etching technique, that had been produced in the

[17]
 PAUL DELAROGHE

2 Eugéne-Ferdinand Buttura, Portrait of Paul Delaroche, 1849,

engraving by Jules-Gabriel Levasseur, 1853.

period. The almost complete neglect of this once highly esteemed art form in our own times 1s a
peculiarity which mirrors the drastic fall from grace of Delaroche’s own painting 1n the years of
the ascendant modern movement.
Around 1850, however, Delaroche was at the peak of his fame (illus. 2). It makes no sense to
put forward grandiose claims on his behalf, except insofar as they contribute towards distin-
guishing him from so many other artists of the Romantic period whose reputation has devel-
oped more evenly and more cumulatively than his. Yet he was probably, at this point, the most
widely known and acclaimed painter in the Western world. The assiduity with which Goupil
had promoted his prints in Paris, London, New York and other centres was in part responsible
for this exceptionally widespread reputation. But this was not the whole story. For the prints to
be susceptible of such promotion, the images had to have a special character of their own. Hen-
riquel-Dupont’s various prints of Cromime// may indeed have enabled Delaroche’s image to be
widely circulated. But for the image to be converted to ‘A Travesty of De La Roche’s Celebrated
Picture’, as in an English woodcut of4December 1851, a particular conciseness and memorabil-
ity had to be built in from the start (illus. 3).
Yet the circumstances in French politics that provided the immediate occasion for this
“Travesty’ point to the sad irony that darkened the last years of his life. In 1834, when the

[18]
 RIS EAN D PALL (OR A REPUTATION

“ —S=> “i FE—— i=

LOUIS NAPOLEON VIEWING HE BODY OF LIBERTY.

DECEMBER 4ru, 1851,

(A Travesly of De La Roche’s Celebriled Picture.)

3 Anonymous cartoon, Louis Napoleon viewing the Body of Liberty. December 4th, 1851.
(A Travesty of De La Roche’s Celebrated Picture.).

Grand Duke Leopold II had introduced himself at Camaldoli, Delaroche was indeed a well-
known and brilliantly successful painter in his own national context. The revolution of 1848,
however, while it led in a few years to the personal rule of Louis Napoleon, resulted in the
short term in a drastic curtailment of the state patronage that had sustained the arts under the
July Monarchy. For Delaroche, this was a bitter blow. It was as if his own position as a leading
member of the Academie, and a teacher nurturing the careers of his former pupils, had been
completely undermined. In a remarkable letter, partly quoted in Delaborde’s memoir, Dela-
roche testified to the immediate impact on his life and prospects of the revolution of 1848, and
also incidentally to the vertiginous possibilities that opened up when he seriously contemplated
exploiting the fame which he had acquired outside his native country:
Tam 51 years old, my children are still quite young and have no one but me. It is necessary therefore for
me to take a decision about completing their education seriously and assuring their future, if it is stll
possible to dream of so great a happiness. Friends tell me to go to the United States, it is a new country
and with the help of your name you will make a fortune there. Others want me to go to Russia where
everyone awaits me, beginning with the Emperor. . . In England, the Queen has just bought from me
a small reduction after my Napoleon at Fontainebleau. Colnaghi the Print Merchant of the Court claims
that my name is in odour of sanctity in that country and I will make as much as I could wish. Should I
go to the nearest? Should I take it as far as St Petersburg. . . Would it be better to try the United States?
I would make up my mind quickly if'a good friend like you said to me, Iam free, let us go together, we
will not leave each other. . . but you are not free and Iam on my own for the rest of my sad life and it is
indeed difficult, indeed hard for me to repress each day at the bottom of my heart all the thoughts
which stifle it.
One is tempted to say that all the tensions of Delaroche’s later life are blazoned vividly in this
letter. There is the evidence of the continued ill health that was to dog him up to his death eight

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 PAUL D ELA R Ore

years later (the letter begins with a reference to his ‘atrocious neuralgic pains’). There is the
anxiety for the future of his young family, motherless since 1845. There is the yearning for
intimate friendship, which comes through especially in his letters to a chosen group of former
pupils (in this letter, as usual, he addresses Henri Delaborde as ‘cher enfant’). ‘There is quite
enough to justify Alexandre Dumas’s imputation of a certain misanthropy, at least as it must
have seemed from the point of view of a younger and decidedly ebullient character.
There is also, however, the index of what might have been open to Delaroche, had he chosen
to go on the road at this point in his career. What the anonymous ‘friends’ told him was no
fantasy. Queen Victoria, alerted no doubt by her Orleans connections, had indeed become a
supporter of his work.*? Colnaghi, who distributed the prints of the Maison Goupil in
London, were well placed to access the demand for his services. In effect, the British aristocracy
had already shown an enterprising willingness to purchase large-scale compositions from him,
to such an extent as to rouse the anger of the native-born Benjamin Robert Haydon.*7 The
Russian aristocrat Count Anatole Demidoff, possessor of Lady Jane Grey and several other
works, had spearheaded a lively interest in his paintings in Eastern Europe. But in Central
Europe, at any rate, Delaroche also satisfied a bourgeois taste. Heinrich Schletter, a Leipzig
banker, insisted on having the original version of Napoleon at Fontainebleau (1845) as a promi-
nent feature in the collection, which gave rise, in 1858, to the new Museum der bildenden
Kiinste at Leipzig.”
This brief list of Delaroche’s international connections could be extended (and glossed)
almost indefinitely. But the point is surely clear. By 1834, the bubble of his fame as a young
painter had swelled to an astonishing, perhaps unmatched, extent within his native France.
But a decade later he was, as Haydon acidly put it, ‘famous’, not only because his work was avail-
able for purchase by Russian counts, German bankers and British peers, but also because a new
culture of images — diffused through a quite unprecedented variety of techniques of reproduc-
tion — was supplanting the traditional culture, focused upon Salon and Académie. David and
his school had enhanced the prestige, on a European scale, of modern French painting. After
the fall of Napoleon, indeed, the notoriety of the great revolutionary artist had led to such spec-
tacles as a public display of a full-scale replica of his Coronation ofNapoleon (1806-7) in the
centre of London.” But Delaroche acquired his international fame in a context where not
only fine reproductive engraving but the innovatory techniques of lithography and photogra-
phy had begun to signal a radical shift in the production and consumption of images. What is
more, it will be argued here that his visual language corresponded, in very precise respects, to
the ideal and practical requirements of this new code. The broad claim to be made in this study
is that we tend to falsify the character of this momentous shift in visual culture by identifying it
largely with the invention of photographic technique, as in Walter Benjamin’s all too celebrated
essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. No less important than the
achievement of the chemists in capturing the trace of light rays on a specially treated surface was
the work in and through representation carried out by such a painter as Delaroche, who may be
said to have schooled the public in novel types of empathetic participation and response.*°
* * *

[20]
 RISE AND PALIOOP A REPUTATION

Delaroche did not leave for the United States, England or Russia after 1848. His state of health,
his family obligations and, no doubt, his sense of what would be conducive to his work inclined
him to adopt a mid-way solution to the dilemma about a place of residence. He retained the
house and studio in Paris that he had occupied since his marriage in 1835. But he also took a
house in Nice, where he was able to live and work during the winter months. In the still
tranquil environment of this small town on the fringe of the kingdom of Sardinia and
Piedmont, he was able to carry out the large-scale replicas of existing works that were commis-
sioned from him, and also to begin the series of religious paintings which were his most private,
but equally his most original, achievement.*’
In the following chapters, I shall attempt to show in detail how the visual syntax of Delaro-
che’s paintings was assembled and developed, from the early works of the 1820s to these final
paintings that remain virtually unknown. But, having sketched out in a very preliminary
fashion the overall shape of Delaroche’s career, and made large claims for his significance in
the context of his period, I must also attempt to deal in a preliminary way with the other side
ofDelaroche’s reception, that is, the quite remarkable neglect which his work has suffered in the
period roughly coincident with the rise of Modernism. Such neglect, it need hardly be added, is
not simply a matter of fashion, though it can also be interpreted in this way. The exclusion of
Delaroche from serious consideration, at nearly all levels but that of the history of taste, is surely
a measure ofthe offence that his work in particular caused to those who had schooled their per-
ceptions to accommodate and appreciate Delacroix, Courbet, Manet and Cezanne. This seems
an irrefutable, even a banal, point. But it does not follow from it that Delaroche was simply a
bad painter in the same sense that Delacroix and his successors were good painters. Or rather, it
needs to be shown (and it has certainly not been shown) in what way Delaroche conceived and
developed his images, following procedures that were certainly akin to those of his pre-modern
contemporaries but differed from them in many essential respects. Posterity has very amply
atoned for the hurt done to Delacroix by the superior prestige of the contemporary who was
his near homonym, and whose seat at the Academie des Beaux-Arts was the very one finally
secured by Delacroix after his death” At present, the balance needs to move back, ifonly a
little way, in Delaroche’s direction.
It will indeed be a particular contention of this study that the pendulum has started to swing,
and that the resistance to Delaroche, though still considerable, has been significantly under-
mined. Two instances help to reinforce this point. Delaroche’s Lady Jane Grey now holds an
honoured place in the early nineteenth-century French room of the National Gallery,
London, having been promoted from a liminal space between two galleries. It was not always
so. Bought from the Demidoff sale of 1870 by an English businessman, the painting was be-
queathed to the National Gallery in 1902, but was ‘shuttled back and forth between the
National Gallery and the Tate until in 1928 it was officially declared a “total loss” owing to
damage received in the Thames flood’.** This is no doubt the reason why a fine sheet of
drawings for the work in the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre bears the laconic note: ‘Jane
Grey (Tate) détruit.*+ But the extent of the ‘destruction’ had been vastly exaggerated, as the
Director of the National Gallery, Michael Levey, discovered when he took the trouble to have

[21]
 PAU DEA ROI EI

it unrolled in 1973. Basically the painting was in fine condition, under discoloured varnish, and
only required to be cleaned and put on a stretcher before being placed on exhibition once again.
The painting was, however, given its renewed visibility as a prime example of ‘Salon-style’
work, to contrast with received views of French nineteenth-century art. Its immense popularity
with the public was unanticipated.*
Symptomatic of this concern to present Lady Jane Grey primarily as a curiosity from a
previous age requiring a sympathetic historical consideration is the pamphlet produced by the
National Gallery, under the aegis of Cecil Gould, when the work went on view in 1975. “The
aim of the exhibition is not to try to rehabilitate Delaroche, Gould firmly states. “The only
question concerning him which is likely to interest the current generation is just why was he
so successful in his lifetime . . ”°° It would be a fair assumption that very few visitors to the
National Gallery, who congregate today around the affecting spectacle of Lady Jane Grey, are
asking themselves just why he was so successful in his lifetime. We can let that pass, however.
The real irony is that Gould, having decided to present the work 1n a firmly historicized context,
chose to do so by pairing it with the criticism of Gautier. Though conceived with the intention
of making the painting ‘more palatable’ [sic], this decision to accompany it with a prophylactic
dose of the critic who contributed more than any to demolishing Delaroche’s reputation can
only appear paradoxical. By 1857, when Gautier published the essay translated by Gould as a
response to Delaroche’s posthumous exhibition, he had admittedly achieved a more balanced
view of the artist’s achievement, and his viewpoint is by any standard highly revealing. But this
retrospective analysis of Delaroche’s career from the point of view of someone who believed that
‘true painters’ took a quite different path can only be seen as an endorsement and rational-
ization of the judgement that Modernist connoisseurs were to make on Delaroche, and not
the historical explanation for his success.
It would be easier to dismiss as quaint the precautions that were taken in 1975 when exposing
the British public to Lady Jane Grey, if the ensuing two decades had seen a clarification of De-
laroche’s status by the combined work of curators, collectors and art historians. In fact, we still
have no idea what to think about Delaroche. Without going at any length into the stray signs
that indicate his highly anomalous position, I should simply point out that the valuation is ex-
tremely arbitrary, no doubt in part as a result of the lack of any scholarly consensus on the shape
of his career as a whole. In 1995, three of his works were sold at auction: Napoleon in lus Study
(1838), Return from Golgotha (1856) and a so-called Sketch for ‘The Childhood ofPico della Mir-
andola’ (c.1845), which is incidentally nothing of the kind.*” The first, sold on behalf of the des-
cendants of the Countess of Sandwich, its original owner, reached the surprisingly high price of
$390,000 1n New York, perhaps because of its perennially attractive subject-matter. The other
two, which had remained in the possession of Delaroche’s family, achieved modest prices at
auction in Paris. In the case of the former, bought for the Museum of Nantes, the clearly un-
finished character explains the sale price of 122,000 francs. But Return from Golgotha, secured
most enterprisingly for the Musee Departemental de Oise at Beauvais, raised the startlingly
low sum of 15,100 francs.*° As it happens, the same Return from Golgotha, one of Delaroche’s
last and most radical works, received an offer of 25,000 francs when it was shown at Goupil’s
 RISE AND PALLIOFR A REPUTATION

gallery — a sum well in excess of that paid for major commissioned paintings such as the Virgin
and Child (1844) for which Lord Hertford paid 16,000 francs. Delaroche, however, rejected this
incentive to break up the full set of four paintings to which the Return from Golgotha belonged.
He was still working on them at the time of his death.*”
If this last phase in Delaroche’s career still seems virtually unknown and undervalued, it
might appear that justice has begun to be done to the work that began his run of success in
1824: Joan ofArc in Prison. This painting has become the subject of the only major iconographic
and historical study of a single work by Delaroche to appear in recent years: indeed Marie-
Pierre Foissy-Aufrere’s ‘dossier d'une oeuvre’, published on the occasion of an exhibition to
celebrate the purchase of the work for the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Rouen, sets new standards
for the serious analysis of Delaroche’s sources, and casts a flood of light on his later career as
well.*° Joan ofArc has reappeared, resplendently, in a recent collective exhibition, Les Années
romantiques, held at the Musee des Beaux-Arts of Nantes and at the Grand Palais, Paris,
between January and July rg96. But the very utility of such an exhibition in bringing together
great numbers of little-known paintings from the period 1815—50 is undermined by the
ensuing impression — registered by visitors and critics alike — that there is no special reason,
other than chronology, for making such a juxtaposition. ‘Romanticism’ in painting remains a
problematic concept, all the more so when the net is cast over a vastly ramified family of
artists, loosely associated by their subject-matter, studio practice, Salon participation and sty-
listic affiliations.*"
It is my contention that Delaroche — whose Joan ofArc also provided the most spectacular
poster advertising this show — offers one of the vital threads that will enable us to make sense of
this confused situation: not indeed by enabling us to define Romanticism in painting in a
fashion that will satisfy all possible cases, but precisely by clarifying the concrete choices
which, at each stage of his diverse career, led him to situate his work dialectically in relation to
other contemporary practices. It is with the plotting of these moves, invested as they are with a
strong and evolving sense of artistic selfhood, that the following chapters will be particularly
concerned. But the remaining part of this introduction needs to set the scene for this account
by turning away from the contemporary indices of Delaroche’s resistance to interpretation, and
looking back once again to the climate ofnineteenth-century criticism, within which his paint-
ings were first conspicuously lauded, and then dismissed as being of no interest at all. This will
not supplant the need to look again at such contemporary valuations in the context of individual
works. But it may provide a framework for appreciating why it was that Delaroche’s reputation
took such a spectacular fall, and why this very blacklisting betrays an equivocation endemic in
the new visual culture of the first halfofthe nineteenth century.
To start at the beginning, Stendhal has hardly commenced his criticism of the Salon of 1824,
with a brief account of the conflicting interests involved and a compliment to Horace Vernet,
before he notes the appearance of anew talent:
Above this [battle scene of Horace Vernet], there is a Cardinal Interrogating Joan of Arc in her Prison, a
picture which will make a name for its author. The cardinal, clothed in red and commodiously seated in
the depths of this cold prison, has all the insensitivity, all the astuteness that one could wish. Poor Joan
 PA UIE DE ARO
1G Ee

of Arc, by contrast, chained to her bed of grief, protests the truth of her responses, with all the frank-
ness and warmth of a heroic soul. The movement of this figure makes a beautiful contrast with the
excessively subtle air of the interrogator.**

It is indeed mildly ironic that Stendhal does not bother to identify the young painter whose
‘name’ is to be made by the painting, especially as he makes no secret of the fact that there
were 1,152 artists among whom to choose. This may, however, point to a feature of Delaro-
che’s work which is more than just accidental (as we shall see). Central to Stendhal’s critical
estimate of the painting is the fact that he values it precisely for the ‘truth’ and diversity of the
expressions of character represented there. This is quite consistent with his usual approach to
contemporary art, as expressed in his Salon criticism and also in what Henri Martineau has
called ‘the first Romantic manifesto of painting’, his Flistoire de la peinture en Italie. More than
once in his published and unpublished writings, Stendhal uses as his acid test for the new
Romantic mentality the degrees of intensity represented by the main participants in a well-
known work by his friend, the painter Pierre-Narcisse Guerin — Phaedra and Hippolytus
(Louvre) — originally exhibited at the Salon of 1802. Discussing the all-important concept of
the ‘beau moderne’, Stendhal compares the relative degrees of expression in the three main par-
ticipants in the scene, based on the dramas ofEuripides (FZippo/ytus) and Racine (Phedre): “Hip-
polytus belongs to antique beauty, Phaedra to modern beauty, and Theseus to the Michelangelo
taste’.+4 So Phaedra, with her guilty secret and her red-rimmed eyes, becomes the touchstone
for a beauty of expression which affects the contemporary viewer more deeply than the Renais-
sance gravity of her husband, ‘Theseus, or the ephebic purity of the object of her love. Delaro-
che’s Joan of Arc, though she emerges from a different play of affective contrasts, strikes a
similar note of vivid animation, recognizable for Stendhal as the authentic timbre of the epoch.
A few years later, the novelist George Sand commented on a further success of Delaroche, his
Princes in the Tower at the Salon of 1831, in a letter to her young son, Maurice Dudevant:
There are very beautiful pictures in the Museum, the Museum is a great gallery where all the painters
exhibit their pictures for a few months to let the public see them. The prettiest of all represents two
children of seven or eight years old who are seated on a bed. There is one of them who is ill and leans
his head on the shoulder of his brother. ‘The one who is well holds a book of pictures to amuse him. It is
the portrait of two young English princes who were strangled by wicked people.*

George Sand’s comments are analogous to those of Stendhal, even to the point of omitting the
name of the artist, and particularly in expressing the content of the picture in terms of an im-
mediately striking and verbally communicable segment of narrative, a ‘story’. Of course, in
George Sand’s case, the reason for explaining the picture in this way, and perhaps for
choosing it as the ‘prettiest of all’, lies in the degree to which it will make an appeal to a young
boy who will probably have no chance to see it. Stendhal’s critique, by contrast, involves an
implicit dialogue with the works which he discusses. It invites us to verify for ourselves the
quality of Phaedra’s intensity or Joan of Arc’s frankness, in the light of other examples. But the
fact remains. Stendhal has not said any more than George Sand about the handling of the
picture, about its technical aspects, and to this extent, his estimate cannot avoid running the
risk that the mother’s letter to her child self-evidently accepts: it is communicable only with

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 RISE AND FALL OFA REPUTATION

regard to certain specific assumptions about the psychology and predispositions of the
audience, and not with regard to observable and objectively verifiable features of technique.
This distinction is significant, I would hold, because the critical trajectory that leads out of
Romanticism (as Stendhal understood it) in the direction of Modernism involves specifically
the foregrounding of the elements of technique. Gautier is a faithful index of this major reinter-
pretation of the criteria for advanced contemporary painting, and his message amounts to
saying that, since the bourgeoisie is exclusively preoccupied with the subject-matter of art, the
great painter will be the very person who accords least importance to such distractions. ‘If you
see a visitor to a gallery fingering his catalogue in order to find out the historical scene or
anecdote represented, instead of looking at it and enjoying it, you may be sure he is no lover
of painting.*° Delaroche commits the sin of giving ‘a great deal of thought to that type of
visitor. Purity of draughtsmanship, strength or finesse of modelling, colour harmonies, imita-
tion and idealization of nature through style meant less to him than curiosity concerning the
choice of subject.”
The very neatness with which Gautier contrives to typecast Delaroche as the bourgeois
painter par excellence 1s surely suspicious and (as has been emphasized before) his rigidity does
in fact soften in the case of afew, more perceptive criticisms of the later work. But in order to see
how the ideology of pure painting to which he adhered served as a stick to beat Delaroche over a
considerable period, we have only to look at the way in which Henry James described the evolu-
tion of his view of Delaroche over the third quarter of the nineteenth century, beginning with
the fortuitous experience of coming across the great retrospective show at the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts, on a family visit to Europe. James was fourteen years old in 1857, and ifhis elder brother
was thoroughly persuaded of the genius of Delacroix, he himself preferred the spectacle of De-
laroche’s works:

Yet Les Enfants d’Edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and I couldn’t doubt that the long-drawn odd
face of the elder prince, sad and sore and sick, with his wide crimped sidelocks of fair hair and his violet
legs marked by the garter and dangling from the bed, was a reconstitution of far-off history of the
subtlest and most ‘last word’ modern or psychologic kind . . . and I can surely have enjoyed up to
then no formal exhibition of anything as much as I at one of those seasons enjoyed the commemorative
show of Delaroche given, soon after his death, in one of the rather bleak sa//es of the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts to which access was had from the quay. 7ere was reconstituted history if one would, in the straw-
littered scaffold, the distracted ladies with three-cornered coifs and those immense hanging sleeves
that made them look as if they had bath-towels over their arms; in the block, the headsman, the
bandaged eyes, of Lady Jane Grey. .

In this brilliant passage, written as part of his Autobiography over fifty years after the events de-
scribed, James only permits his irony to invade and overhaul by gradual stages the freshness of
the remembered perception: we can glimpse him, like the young Maurice Dudevant or indeed
the worldly Stendhal, momentarily captivated by the novelty of Delaroche’s creations. But as
early as 1873, when he wrote his essay on “The Wallace Collection’, he had so far repented of
his youthful infatuation to be specially harsh on Delaroche and his father-in-law, Horace
Vernet:
 PAW. Di ea ROCKET

‘Touch’ had small magic with either of these painters; pitifully small with the former, we may almost
say, in view of his respectable and generous aims. He was the idol of our youth, and we wonder we can
judge him so coldly. But, in truth, Delaroche is fatally cold himself. His Last [//ness of Mazarin and his
Richelieu and Cing Mars (small pieces and meant to be exquisite) exhibit a singular union of vigorous
pictorial arrangement and flatness and vulgarity of execution.*”

James’s heroes in modern painting are not the same as Gautier’s. In this essay, James singles out
Ernest Meissonier as a painter with ‘inexorable certainty of eye and hand’; and in another
critique twenty years later he defends Sargent against the accusation of ‘want of “finish”’ by
saying that he exhibits ‘the last word of expressiveness of touch’.®° Common to the rhetoric of
both Gautier and James, however, is the use of Delaroche to signify the furthest point in the
scale from what good modern painting may be taken to be.

It is indeed striking that this low valuation of Delaroche should have been perpetuated, essen-
tially unchanged, from the stigmas of Gautier and James, to the testimony of a recent curator at
the National Gallery whose only interest is in wondering ‘just why he was so successful in his
lifetime’. Even more striking is the fact that the historical estimate for which Cecil Gould not
unreasonably calls has been continuously and roundly denied. There are no satisfactory
accounts of Delaroche’s engagement, as an artist, with the history of his own times: none
which does not, in the last resort, turn away from his ‘success’ as if it were a head of Medusa,
and, eschewing creative thought, inhibit any extended discussion of his place in the history of
visual culture. The problem lies, in great part, in the relevance of Delaroche to the fundamental
issue of Modernism, which is the progressive and seemingly irreversible validation of an avant-
garde tradition to the exclusion of other, supposedly retrograde, tendencies. But if Delaroche
falls foul of any historical approach which focuses on the emergence of a tradition of avant-
garde painting, it is not so clear that he can be summarily rejected when it comes to the history
of visual culture as a whole. Such, at any rate, is the contention of this study, and in the final part
of this introduction I will sketch out some of the historiographical issues involved.
In the first place, let us look briefly at one of the modern estimates of Delaroche’s work,
which, though brief and schematic, has a certain importance because of the paucity of other
material. The chapter on “The juste nulieu and Thomas Couture’, in Romanticism and Realism
by Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner (first published as an essay in the Nem York Review of
Books>’), is largely concerned with giving a qualified approval to the painting of Delaroche’s
pupil Thomas Couture. But it takes time off in its early pages to discuss the concept of the
Juste nulieu and its relevance to Delaroche. Or rather — to put it more exactly — it uses these
pages essentially to gloss the adverse opinion delivered by the critic Gustav Planche at the
Salon of 1833 of the painters who stood for ‘conciliation’ (the ‘middle’ path), as opposed to
those who advocated ‘renovation’ (Ingres and his school) and ‘innovation’ (those following De-
lacroix). It then reinforces Planche’s point by quoting, at length, the judgement delivered by
Leon Rosenthal in his ‘great book of 1914’, Du Romantisme au réalisme, on Delaroche and his
fellow conciliators. For Rosenthal, the failure of their work resides — as it did for Gautier and

| 26 |
 Risk AN DEALT OPA REP ULATION

James — in their neglect of the values of painting in the interests ofan enhanced accessibility. ‘If
we examine a picture signed by a painter of the juste milieu, whatever its dimensions or whatever
its subject, we are struck at first by its immediate intelligibility.
There is a problem here in the structure of Rosen’s and Zerner’s argument. Are they really
implying that the last word on Delaroche has been written by a historian of 1914, who was
himself repeating in all essential respects the judgements of an advanced critic of the
Romantic period? Are they assuming that the key concepts in this critical tradition — let us
say, for example, the concept of the ‘intelligibility’ of subject-matter — mean the same to a his-
torian writing in the epoch of Cubism as they did to Gautier and Planche, and can be assumed
to mean approximately the same thing to us today? It would indeed be remarkable if Delaro-
che’s paintings had become stuck in this hermeneutic groove, with their limitations identified
conclusively for all time.
This point was made in a trenchant way by the art historian Albert Boime, who challenged
Rosen and Zerner at the time ofthe first publication of their essay.°* But the exchange of views,
seen in retrospect, indicates the great difficulty in extracting the argument about Delaroche’s
painting from a more general argument about tradition and the avant-garde, which was then
polarizing opinion in the United States and, to a certain extent, in Europe. Boime, the author
of the book on Couture that gave rise to the essay, violently repudiates what he sees as the
attempt of Zerner and Rosen to saddle him with a ‘neo-conservative’ agenda. That is to say,
he protests that his work on Couture is simply an attempt to restore the artist to his historical
context, and not a veiled plea for a canon which relegates Manet and the Modernists to a less
egregious place.*t Nonetheless, as the exchange makes clear, both positions in the debate were
inevitably related to the unhelpfully polarized argument about art pompier, as it was known in
France. Boime might reject the accusation of being a ‘neo-conservative’, but he was ready to
accuse Rosen and Zerner of being ‘neo-liberal’, that is, anxious to devalue the major exponents
of nineteenth-century Salon painting in favour of a proleptic reading in which the avant-garde
take all the prizes.
These issues are by no means dead today, as Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s re-edition of an essay
summing up the debate makes clear.>> But it is possible to detect the emergence in the recent
past of a more productive agenda, from Delaroche’s point of view. Rosen and Zerner are right to
note, in their essay, that Delaroche’s ‘penetrability’ (‘the eye goes right through the painted
canvas to the scene or object represented’) is related to the contemporary developments in
visual spectacle: the appeal of the art of the juste milieu, they argue, ‘is comparable to that of
the panoramas and dioramas that were so popular at the time’.®” They are also right, in this
sense, to claim that such painters belong ‘between high art and popular culture’. But this asser-
tion should not be taken to imply that no art-historical interest resides in the way in which such
painters achieved their effect of ‘penetrability’, or that the type of painting which strikes this
balance must drop into a no-man’s-land of interpretation where classic critiques may be
recycled ad infinitum.
One of the most hopeful signs of new thought on the visual culture of the nineteenth century
has come in a short book whose message is nonetheless both cogent and radical: Jonathan
 PAU ie D Pia kK Orns

Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (tggo). Crary’s broad thesis is that art history’s infatuation
with the avant-garde of the late nineteenth century has involved a displacement of attention
from the early to the later aspects of the visual revolution associated with modernity, and
loaded upon the painters who followed Manet the responsibility for transforming modes of
vision, which were in fact being altered and reconstituted long before. Crary’s strategy 1s to
turn attention to the new visual ‘techniques’ through which the observer was impelled to
bring bodily action and the sense of sight into a new active synthesis, in public spectacles such
as the diorama and in private displays such as the phenakistoscope. But his parenthetic
comments on the art of this earlier period imply that the work of Delaroche, and many others
contemporary with him, needs to be read in the light ofa break in the tradition that was only too
perceptible at the time. These artists ‘together incarnated a surface of mimetic and figural re-
presentation apparently similar to but disquietingly unlike what had preceded it?°’ Indeed, we
can see as specially pertinent to the reception that Delaroche has continued to attract from such
contemporaries as Rosen and Zerner the comment which Crary makes on the failure of nine-
teenth-century art historians to come to terms with the work being produced in their own
times. This testifies to the fact that such work ‘constituted a radically different visual language
that could not be submitted to the same methods of analysis, that could not be made to speak in
the same ways, that even could not be read.5®
It seems a long way from discussing the ‘intelligibility’ and ‘penetrability’ of Delaroche’s
painting to framing hypotheses about the possibility that his visual language could not be
read. But there is really no inconsistency. Romantic critics and nineteenth-century art histor-
ians could only signal their discomfort with a phenomenon that seemed all too evident with
regard to its effects on the bourgeois public, but took its preconditions from a radical shift in
visual culture, which still eluded analysis. One telling symptom of this unease can be found in
the disposition of some of the most advanced critics to deny the specifically pictorial character
of Delaroche’s work, and pigeonhole him by using a derogatory version of wt pictura poesis. Both
Gautier and Alexandre Dumas (the latter in a rather more reflective fashion) asserted that De-
laroche was to painting as the Romantic playwright Casimir Delavigne was to the theatre.*”
Without any doubt, the relationship of Delaroche to the Romantic theatre, and to the concept
of ‘theatricality’ as it has been developed in the analysis of the visual arts, is a fascinating one,
and it will receive full attention here.°° But in the context of Gautier’s remarks, it has the effect
of foreclosing, rather than opening discussion. ‘What then is Paul Delaroche’s standing to pos-
terity?’ asks Gautier. ‘He will be to painting what Casimir Delavigne is to poetry.” Posterity has
excused itself from the burden of this analogy by forgetting about Delavigne, while still contin-
uing to look at Delaroche’s paintings.
In fact, quite a different analogy between the arts seems no less relevant when it comes to
identifying the work that needs to be done in unravelling Delaroche’s complex and intercon-
nected pictorial structures. In a recent essay on the composer Felix Mendelssohn, John Toews
analysed with great subtlety the special character which his music came to develop in relation to
the giants of the classical tradition:

[28|
 RISE AN DIPFAL LD OF A REPUTATION

Development within structural continuity (especially evident in Mendelssohn’s cautiously conserva-

tive tonal and rhythmic relations), the evolving variation of a directing ‘idea’ or musical subject,
replaced the dialectical oppositions and heroic resolutions of the classical period . . . Mendelssohn’s
self-conscious, elaborate application of complex musical techniques to sustain the identity of the
musical subject through a narrative sequence of transformative variations and enriching episodes
produced for many later listeners . . . an impression of bland homogeneity, effortless simplicity, and
‘smoothness’. Mendelssohn, however, worked laboriously to achieve this sense of apre-given or ‘trans-
cendent identity, not a unity immanently constructed within the work or yearned for as an absent ideal
= aaharqie . fs 4 P ; . 62
or future possibility, but a unity ‘discovered’ or ‘revealed’ in an exegetical process.’

It is interesting indeed to note the suggestive parallels between Mendelssohn’s career and that of
Delaroche: the ‘first period of compositional creativity’ lasting, in Mendelssohn’s case, from
1825 to 1833 and involving the historicist project of the ‘Reformation Symphony’; the
marriage in 1836 resulting both in a ‘new level of inner equilibrium” and in a move
to the Direc-
torship of the prestigious Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, in which position he was able to
nurture his national and, increasingly, international fame.’ But such an analogy leads
nowhere if it does not point towards ways of understanding and analysing the works them-
selves. In that respect, Toew’s remarks are valuable not only because they show that another,
similarly positioned artist worked hard for his effect of ‘smoothness’, but also because they
invite study of the precise formal devices that Delaroche used to signal his own move away
from the ‘heroic resolutions’ of Neo-classicism.
The reference to Mendelssohn’s historicism also brings into focus the primary characteristic
of Delaroche’s most important and celebrated works, which is their use of historical subject-
matter. With an issue as central to Delaroche’s art as this one, there is no good reason to
attempt a premature characterization of the form which ‘historical genre’ was to take at his
hands before particular examples are ready for analysis. But it will surely be clear, from the
start, that historical subject-matter implied a special contract with a new generation which was
opening up the long-neglected sources for its collective past, and well on the way to developing
that special mentality of the nineteenth century sometimes called ‘historical-mindedness’."* In
this respect, Delaroche’s international fame depended on the successful wager that historical
subjects, if well selected, would prove to be a /ingua franca no less widely diffused than the
Graeco-Roman mythology exploited by Neo-classicism, and probably more engaging to a
nineteenth-century audience, since they reflected a constant process of enquiry, by writers
and dramatists as well as historians, into the concrete form of past events. An article published
in the English Art Journal in 1849, on “Che Works of Paul Delaroche’, indicates that this point
was well taken at the time:

Perhaps no modern historical painter has achieved a wider or more deserving popularity than Paul
Delaroche, arising not less from his high attainments as an artist, than from his choice of subjects,
which generally have been selected from some well-known passages of history, to which all men lay a
. . ‘ : 6c
prescriptive claim on the score of knowledge.”

Here, indeed, is yet a further reason for not remaining content with the depressingly cut-and-
dried judgement on Delaroche delivered by Gautier (at least in his essay of 1857), endorsed by

| 29 |
 PAU L Di AR OG He

Léon Rosenthal and repeated by Zerner and Rosen. Just as Delaroche’s works acquire new
interest in the context provided by Crary’s review of the ‘radically different visual language’ of
the first halfof the nineteenth century — and just as their ‘intelligibility’ offers a challenge to
detailed analysis analogous to the deceptive ‘smoothness’ of Mendelssohn’s compositions — so
their special character needs to be correlated with the distinctive phenomenon of historical re-
presentation as it emerges and develops in the post-Napoleonic era. Historians were, then as
now, notoriously obsessed with the ideal of obtaining ‘penetrability’ or ‘transparency’ to the
past, and in this respect their work forms an epistemological continuum with the visual and
spectacular types of representation that their scholarly instincts repudiated.”” But ‘transpar-
ency’ is, and indeed must be, an effect obtained through and in terms of the specific medium
in which the writer or artist is engaged. Only Heinrich Heine, of Delaroche’s contemporaries,
saw this clearly enough to frame a neat paradox out of the recognition, and the perspicacity of
his remark qualifies it to serve as the epigraph to this study.
It is my prime motive to analyze, in the later chapters of this book, in a degree of detail that
has never been attempted before, the language of Delaroche’s paintings, their formal, spatial
and narrative structures, as they develop in a process of continuity and transformation. ‘This
will inevitably involve the close study of relationships between drawings and finished work,
and between works exhibiting common morphological and iconographic features, that
hitherto has been judged supererogatory by art historians, persuaded as they were of the un-
complicated nature of Delaroche’s modest achievement. Is this preoccupation with a pre-
eminent ‘historical painter’ itself no more than an antiquarian exercise, justified solely by the
will-o’-the-wisp of Delaroche’s vanished nineteenth-century reputation? I have already given
a number of reasons for holding that this is not so. New ways of configuring the field of visual
culture in the modern period are giving his work a prominence that would have been inconcei-
vable only twenty years ago, when Lady Jane Grey was retrieved from the cellars for a mild ex-
periment in the history of taste.
This does not mean, it hardly needs saying, that Delaroche will succeed in dethroning his
great contemporaries, Ingres and Delacroix. But his claim to be not far behind them, in the
interest that his work offers, needs to be taken seriously. Walter Pater, in his discussion of the
art of the Renaissance, developed the useful concept of the ‘secondary painter’, who is neither a
‘force in general culture’ on the level of Michelangelo and Leonardo nor a minor talent deserving
only of ‘mere technical or antiquarian criticism’. Pater’s specific candidate is Botticelli, and he
places him among those artists who possess ‘a distinct faculty of their own by which they
convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere’."” Pleasure is perhaps
not the quality we would immediately associate with Delaroche’s paintings. But the ‘distinct
faculty of [his] owm’ is certainly apprehensible, and exerts its special fascination. Moreover, if
Pater credited Botticelli with bringing us close to ‘the uncertain and diffident promise which
belongs to the earlier Renaissance itself’,°* undeniably Delaroche exudes the atmosphere of the
French Restoration and July Monarchy. In line with Pater’s argument, he is probably a more
faithful index of the ambiguities and tensions of that elusive epoch than his great contempor-
aries. Delaborde certainly thought as much, concluding in his valedictory essay:
 RS BAINID SE AOE AC REP OAT DOuUN

No painter. . . expresses with a greater fidelity the general tendencies and aspirations of the milieu in
which he lived. His works clearly sum up the movement of ideas which has taken place in France, over
thirty years, and the habits of mind, the tastes of the majority.°?

Delaborde also felt that it was for this reason that Delaroche’s name would live and ‘figure as
one of the first in the history of art in the nineteenth century’. In this respect, he was under-
estimating the force of the reaction against his old teacher, consequent upon the sheer incom-
patibility of his practice with the dominant ideology of Modernist painting. But, if the present
revival of interest in Delaroche owes much to the perception that he did indeed fulfil a signifi-
cant historical role, 1t cannot stop at that point. Modernism has taught us that there can be no
understanding of artistic production without close attention to the forms and structures of re-
presentation, and it 1s only just to apply that principle retrospectively to the type of work pro-
grammatically excluded by the Modernist critique.
 PAU Diack O1GIE

4 Moses on the Nile, engraving by Louis-Pierre Henriquel-Dupont, c. 1859.

 ONE

Inscribing the Self

E29

AUL DELAROCHE was not, to use Gautier’s significant phrase, a ‘born painter’.' Whatever
P their relationship to him, his contemporaries agreed that his success came from hard work
and assiduous preliminary research rather than from any god-given talent. In an epoch that was
prone to mythologize the beginnings of an artistic vocation, no one was in any doubt that he had
triumphed by the consistent application of will to circumstance. We can almost sense him
gritting his teeth, when Halevy tells us of an ambition formed, not in the street or the studio,
but in the print room. ‘He admired these engravings which delivered him the painter’s
thoughts, he loved these beauties, but did not wish to remain their sterile guardian . . . For he
will be a painter, this young man dedicated to study.”
This unconventional cast of mind, however, makes it particularly rewarding for us to look
closely at the outset of Delaroche’s career, in the early years of the Restoration. Precisely
because his vocation was, to a large degree, independent of the motivations that fuelled most
young painters in their progress from studio to Salon, he casts an illuminating sidelight on
the tensions and cross-currents of that period. The very diversity of the works which he
produced between 1820 and 1824 — the year of Joan ofArc’s exhibition at the Salon — is not
simply the track record of an untried artist making his way, but gives us a series of signals
which connect him with the cultural conditions prevailing at the time.
It is in Delaroche’s family circumstances that we can observe the origins of this pronounced
and unusual mentality, which led him to impose himself so forcibly and at such an early age. His
father, Gregoire-Hippolyte Delaroche, born in 1761, came from a bourgeois family established
in Paris for several generations. At the time of Paul Delaroche’s birth, on 11 July 1797, he was
dealing in works of art with his partner, Paillet, and living in a substantial house in the Rue de la
Vrilliére, just south of the Place des Victoires.* His wife, Marie-Catherine Begat, born at Ver-
sailles in 1762, could trace her descent from a noble family living in Champagne at the end of the
Middle Ages: Nicolas Le Bégat was Seigneur of Villemorien, a village near Bar-sur-Seine, in
1528. Her present connections, however, were more relevant both to her husband’s profession
and her son’s future career. She was closely related to the Joly family who, in the persons of
Hugues-Adrien Joly (1718-1800) and Adrien-Jacques Joly (1756—1829), presided over the
most significant years in the formation of the national print collection, now the Cabinet des
Estampes of the Bibliothéque Nationale.*
Was Hippolyte Delaroche a cultivated amateur of the arts who was led, by the turmoil of the

[ 33 |
 PAW DYE Tara @) Gr EIen)

revolutionary years, to make a living out of his skills of connoisseurship? Halevy describes him as
an ‘astute appreciator [who] turned to picture dealing’.° Delaborde calls him ‘one of the experts
most habitually consulted at the beginning of this century’. What is clear, at any rate, is the fact
that his activities were both enterprising and, in their context, scholarly. In 1797, the year ofPaul’s
birth, Paris had so far recovered from the paralysis of the Terror for him to be able to plan, with
his partner, a journal based on the new conditions for exhibiting ‘works of art and curiosity’.
This may have come to nothing, but the various catalogues that have survived to record his
cultural and commercial interests make impressive reading. In one undated example, whose re-
ferences to the Emperor Napoleon and the progress of the new Museum at the Louvre place it at
around 1810, he takes time off from applauding the ‘rare and famous’ collection of the Prince
Giustiniani, then being sold in Paris, to congratulate its owner on his sensible decision:

In what point of the whole world could he hope to have it better appreciated, than in the capital of
Europe, and in the moment above all, when the art of painting, restored to its primitive grandeur,
enjoys there all the esteem that it deserves, and spreads out before all eyes, in the Musee Napoleon,
5 , Ric}
its rarest masterpieces:

Delaroche pere has abandoned his sycophantic tone when, in the changed circumstances of the
Bourbon Restoration, he introduces the sale catalogue of the collection of Leon Dufourny, one
of the original directors of the Louvre in its initial post-revolutionary development.’ In this
lively piece of writing, he is however more willing to state his own artistic opinions, which
bear on the traditional dispute between the genres and the utility of collecting prints:

Genre paintings satisfy only the eyes, and history paintings have the double advantage ofpleasing the
eyes and speaking to the soul; which explains why artists and true connoisseurs search so avidly for all
the prints after the works produced by the leaders of the schools."°

There is little need of further evidence to indicate the determining role of Paul Delaroche’s
family background. All his life, he would find collecting and collectors highly congenial. His
own collection of old masters, drawings, prints and books, sold after his death in 1857, doubtless
contained books and works of art which he had inherited from his father." Among his intimate
friends was the collector Rattier, whose purchases he often directed.'* But if we can imagine the
young boy becoming intimately acquainted both with the works that passed through his father’s
hands and with the permanent national collection under the guidance of his maternal uncle, we
can also judge that, for the ambitious father, 1t was not simply a matter of educating a second
generation of experts and connoisseurs. Carried along by the panache of Napoleon’s cultural
policies (as the entry in the Giustiniani catalogue well testifies), Hippolyte Delaroche must
have encouraged the artistic leanings of the son who bore his name, and confirmed his wish to
be a painter.
It is here, however, that biographical platitudes start to break down, and a closer analysis
more in tune with the contradictions of Delaroche’s early career is called for. Hippolyte Dela-
roche and his wife had not one son but two: Jules, born in 1795, and Hippolyte, known in his
family as Paul no doubt to distinguish him from his father, born two years later. There can be no
reason to suppose that Jules was any less favoured with his family’s artistic attentions or

[34]
 INS GRIBING THE SELF

freighted with his father’s ambitions than his younger brother. In fact, as the elder brother, Jules
had an unquestioned priority. In 1816, when the Fall of the Empire and the return of the
Bourbon dynasty impelled Gros to reopen the studio of his master, David, Jules Delaroche
was one of the thirty-four students enrolling there."*
But the priority of Jules had a further consequence, which can only appear significant in the
light of Delaroche pere’s acquaintance with the hierarchy of the genres. In order to avoid the
embarrassment of possible rivalry in the intensely competitive climate of the studio, it was
agreed that Paul should not, in his turn, study as a history painter, but serve his apprenticeship
in the relatively less prestigious genre of landscape. Halevy portrays this as a sensible and equi-
table arrangement between the brothers, while Delaborde and Dumas represent it as a decision
made by the father in the interests of the two sons.'* The difference is not however especially
significant. On the one hand, there is no reason to doubt that Paul remained close to his elder
brother.'> Neither the decision to pursue different genres, nor the subsequent upset in the ar-
rangement, seems to have caused any conflict within the Delaroche family. Hippolyte
Delaroche was, for as long as proved necessary, able to support both his sons in their studies."°
On the other hand, the objective fact of being consigned to a lesser genre cannot have helped
Paul’s morale at the outset of his career. At the very least, it confirmed the tendency, perhaps
inherent in his extensive but unorthodox training as a connoisseur, to rebel against studio
discipline and seek his own individual direction.
In the event, Paul’s training as a landscape painter was of brief duration. Like Jacob gaining
Esau’s birthright (so Halevy reminds us), he himself was to enter Gros’s studio just two years
after his brother. Jules’s artistic vocation withered while Paul’s continued to prosper, and
although he showed paintings in several genres at the Salon from 1819 onwards, his works
were unremarkable, in no sense competing with his brother’s increasingly ambitious sorties in
historical genre. Not achieving a career as a painter, he took his place alongside his father, who
had found a new outlet for his skills in appraisal as the sous-directeur of the state pawnbroking
establishment, the Mont-de-Piété.'7 His younger brother, however, kept up, until after his
great success in the 1824 Salon, the convention of signing his paintings ‘Delaroche Jeune’.
Taken in conjunction with the fact that he also determined, around 1825, to adopt the name
Paul in place of the patriarchal Hippolyte as a component of his signature, this history of signa-
tures is not a trivial affair. Or so at least it will be argued here. It is a telling index of Delaroche’s
struggle to inscribe the self, that is, to achieve authority as an artist in relation to, and in response
to, the social, cultural and familial determinants of his career.

A little has been said about Delaroche’s family background. But this inevitably raises the wider
question of the state of French society in the years immediately following the Bourbon Restora-
tion, as it impinged upon a young man such as Delaroche, who chose to make painting his
career. One ofthe points that needs to be emphasized straight away 1s the fact that artistic pro-
ductivity was increasing in a spectacular fashion throughout the years of Delaroche’s ascent to
fame. If Stendhal was able to home in directly on Joan of Arc among the submissions of 1152
 PAUL DEDAROGHE

artists represented in the 1824 Salon, Lady Jane Grey had to be discerned a decade later, in the
1834 Salon, among 2314 works of art (admittedly, a smaller proportion being history paintings);
and by this stage, from 1833 onwards, the Salon had become an annual occasion." To focus on
Delaroche’s success in singling himself out is, however, to neglect the trouble which it took to
reach his precocious maturity, in circumstances which must have been no less hard for him than
for the many other talented young men who aspired to take the same path.
Theodore Geéricault, whose support and approval for Delaroche’s first major painting will be
recorded later in this chapter, felt so strongly about the deleterious effect of the career structure
offered to such young students of painting that he wrote a short but incisive essay on the
subject. His point was that the tempting prizes offered by the French state in its new monarch-
ical form — since King Louis XVIII did not wish to seem niggardly in artistic patronage by com-
parison with the Emperor — were seducing those who had no real sense of vocation. “The bait of
the Prix de Rome and the facilities of the Academy have attracted a crowd of competitors whom
love alone would not have made painters, and who would have been capable of gaining infinite
honour in other professions.’'? Géricault offers no ready answer for distinguishing ‘the man
who 1s truly called’ from the one who is not, and he readily concedes that the true artist will
thrive on the challenge of surmounting the obstacles set in his path. But the essay’s message
remains clear and uncompromising. Of the young students crowding the studios in the early
years of the Restoration, few are destined for success; and both the system of patronage and
the form of instruction offered to the student are calculated to lead him astray, rather than to
place him on the right road.
Gericault’s testimony is invaluable, and it will help to clarify aspects of Delaroche’s
somewhat unorthodox curriculum vitae. But it would be wrong to assume, as he implies, that
the issue of competition and careerism can be worked out once the hothouse of the arts is aban-
doned. It would be more accurate to suggest that the artistic world — though a microcosm par-
ticularly riven with such tensions — reflected the more general and diffused situation of post-
Napoleonic France. Stendhal would later invent the unforgettable character of Julien Sorel to
illustrate the predicament of a young, educated provincial man of the lower bourgeoisie who
wished to ‘make a career’ for himself in the Restoration period, and was obliged to choose the
black apparel of the clergy (“Le Noir’) as opposed to the bright uniform (‘Le Rouge’) worn by
Napoleon’s aspirants to military glory.*° The present-day theorist René Girard fully acknowl-
edges Stendhal’s aid, together with that of other French writers from the early nineteenth
century onwards, in enabling him to formulate a notion of ‘mimetic desire’ which is rooted in
the nature of a modern society emerging from the break-up of established hierarchies epito-
mized by the French Revolution:

In a society where the place of individuals is not determined in advance and hierarchies have been ob-
literated, people are endlessly preoccupied with making a destiny for themselves, with ‘imposing’
themselves on others, ‘distinguishing’ themselves from the common herd — in a word, with ‘making a
career’. . . Ina world where individuals are no longer defined by the place they occupy by virtue of
their birth or some other stable and arbitrary factor, the spirit of competition can never be appeased
once and for all.*”

[ 36 |
 ENS
GR DBIUN Gr. Dai s 2 LE

I cite Girard here because, building essentially on the insights that he has received from French
novelists such as Stendhal and Proust, he has provided a uniquely comprehensive analysis of
the social and individual effects of mimetic desire, such as permeated in my estimation Dela-
roche’s early years. Readers will no doubt recognize the emergence here of the theme of ‘emula-
tion’ as it has been employed, most resourcefully and pertinently, with regard to the immediate
precursors of Delaroche’s generation, the school of David, and one of his most significantly
related successors, the late nineteenth-century painter, Ernest Meissonier.~ These studies
have helped me immensely in formulating the principal factors in Delaroche’s early develop-
ment, although one must maintain emphatically that his experience was in important respects
quite different from that of the earlier and the later generations.
In effect, the very different careers of the two Delaroche brothers, Jules and Paul, enable us to
appreciate the very specific tensions of the period following the Bourbon Restoration and their
relevance to Gericault’s warnings. There was no doubt at all which was the most prestigious
studio at this time, and the best suited to the pursuit of history painting. The great David,
whose past as a revolutionary and regicide obliged him to go into irrevocable exile after the
Battle of Waterloo, had handed on his studio to one of its most distinguished products,
Antoine-Jean Gros, whose Bonaparte among the Plague-stricken at Jaffa (1804, Louvre) had
indeed ‘established the form of history painting for which the Empire is remembered’. Such
was the pressure of aspiring young artists on the limited space that places had to be reserved
well in advance, and a new entrant could gain access only when another left. Gros himself
appears to have been under no illusions about the practical objectives of his teaching. ‘My job,
he is reported to have remarked, ‘is to form artists and send them to Italy at the expense of the
government.”+
Jules Delaroche was one of the thirty-four students accepted in 1816, when Gros’s studio
opened, and his academy study of a male nude (still retained in the collection of the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts) shows the degree of competence that he had achieved as a figure painter when he
left in 1818 (illus. 5). But where exactly was such a competence intended to lead? ‘The career of
the master himself could be expected to offer some guidance. Gros had without delay embraced
the opportunity to enhance his reputation as the leading history painter of his generation by
undertaking two large commissions intended to document the events of the so-called
Hundred Days, when the Emperor returned from Elba and forced the Bourbons to withdraw
precipitately from their newly reoccupied palaces. The first portrayed the new king, Louis
XVII, leaving Paris, and the second showed another prominent member of the royal family
taking leave of her subjects for a temporary exile: this was the Embarkation of the Duchesse d’An-
gouléme at Pauillac (illus. 6). Gros appears to have completed the second work as early as 1816,
and it would presumably have been accessible to his students. But it had to wait for public ex-
hibition until the Salon of 1819, when it met with a frosty reception.
The reason for this adverse criticism was simple, though it must have been intensely irritat-
ing to Gros and no doubt to his students. Conscious of the moderate opportunities for heroic
portrayal in this inconclusive little episode, he had included in the composition, at the extreme
left-hand side, two anonymous figures of sailors. These contrast effectively with the knot of so-

[ 37]
 PAULI DE aA GO Gia

5 Jules Delaroche, Male Nude Study, 1818, oil on canyas.

licitous officers and apprehensive ladies-in-waiting that forms the centre of the composition,
and have been justly said to demonstrate Gros’s ‘great taste in drawing and colouring’. Unfor-
tunately, this prominence afforded to semi-nude figures attracted vocal criticism from those
who held it to constitute a lack of respect for the Duchess, and it was even suggested that Gros
should cover up ‘the really artistic part of his work’.
The implication was unmistakable. Heroic nude figures, such as had adorned the paintings
of the school ofDavid in the period of Revolution and Empire, were no longer considered ap-
propriate, at least by some critics, in the context of amajor work representing modern history.
Yet Jules Delaroche’s study of 1818 is obviously geared to the kind of motif that Gros had
inserted to show his mettle: it looks as though the student has been using the same studio
model. There is no need to exaggerate the significance of the comments made at the 1819
Salon for Gros’s career. He was, in any case, specially preoccupied with the great commission
for the decoration of the Cupola of the Panthéon, which he saw as vital to the consolidation of
his repute, and which was unveiled to the public only in 1824.7° At the same time, it is impor-
tant to recognize that Gros was fatally prone — as it later proved — to identifying his own artistic

[38]
 IGN SG RoBi (Gee hes Luk

7 Antoine-Jean Gros, Hercules and Diomedes, 1835, oil on canyas.

[ 39 |
 PAUL DE LeARiOlG
Fisk.

identity with the kind of excellence that was historically correlated with the studio practice of
David and his school. In the 1835 Salon, he exhibited the vast and horrific Hercules and
Diomedes, whose withering reception by the critic Jal was widely held to have precipitated his
suicide in the same year.’ For his biographer Delestre, however, the critics had failed precisely
to comprehend that this portentous and fateful work was aimed at securing ‘a glory of the
studio’ (une gloire datelier): only his peers and rivals, according to Delestre’s surprising admis-
sion, were qualified to judge it (illus. 7).7
My aim is certainly not to drive a wedge between Delaroche and Gros, the master in whose
studio he was to work from around 1818 to 1820. After Gros’s suicide in 1835, it was Delaroche,
recently returned from his first Italian journey, who was chosen from among the ex-students to
give the official speech beside the coffin of ‘the author of The Plague offaffw — and 1t is likely
that Gros would have approved of the choice.*? But there can be no doubt that Delaroche was
not a model student in these testing years when his vocation was confirmed against a bewilder-
ing background of false starts. One way of looking at this is to say that the elder brother, Jules,
despite a modest talent, became a casualty of the emulative system that Gros’s studio continued
to perpetuate. He was a victim of the overproduction of budding artists to which Gericault’s
anxious essay drew attention and, since he could not compete successfully in the academic
contests that offered a road to Italy and fame, he simply fell by the wayside. Paul Delaroche,
however, betrayed his unease with the system by treating it in an unconventional and transgres-
sive fashion. Although I do not doubt for a moment that his concern to establish himself as an
artist involved the pressures of ‘mimetic desire’, I suspect that his greater resilience lay partly in
his conviction that ‘glories of the studio’ offered only one way of advancement — and that a
somewhat contested one, since public opinion was becoming increasingly intolerant of the
Davidian mode.*°
Delaroche’s highly ambivalent attitude to the establishment system of academic advance-
ment is well demonstrated by two anecdotes told by Halevy, which relate respectively to his
abortive landscape studies and to his odd relationship with Gros. In consigning his younger
son to the study of landscape, Delaroche pere was not simply condemning him to a minor and
unfashionable genre. From 1815 onwards, the issue of establishing a grand prix in paysage histo-
rique had been actively considered by the Academy, and a positive decision was taken in 1816,
most probably the year when Delaroche began his studies.*’ Louis-Etienne Watelet (1780—
1866), the landscape painter to whose studio he was attached, had himself studied with the
most illustrious contemporary exponent of historical landscape, Valenciennes, and was to
train a whole generation of landscape painters, including Delaroche’s friend and companion at
Camaldoli in 1834, Edouard Bertin.** Although none of Delaroche’s landscape works, from this
or any other period, has survived, there can be no reason to suppose that he failed to respond, in
the initial stages at any rate, to the stimulus of this innovatory studio.*%
Halevy, however, recounts that Delaroche’s most public sortie in the genre of historical land-
scape was the fruit of a quite fortuitous encounter. Having already left Watelet’s studio, he
happened one day to come across some of his former fellow students on their way to the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts, where the preliminary heats for the first grand prix de paysage historique were

[ 40 |
 DNS: GRE BLN GeinES BLP

being held. ‘Seized suddenly by a bizarre fancy’, as Halevy puts it, Delaroche joined the group
and took part in the contest, though he had not trained for it in any way. Delaroche’s enterprise
was rewarded when he passed the first round and was summoned to the final stages of the com-
petition. But he did not succeed in winning the prize, which was unanimously conferred on the
magnificent painting Democritus and the Abderitans, submitted by his near contemporary,
Achille-Etna Michallon.*+
According to Halevy, this experience depressed Delaroche and deterred him from taking
part in competitions: to which it can be retorted that anyone who was disappointed by a
reverse suffered in such odd circumstances must have had prior difficulties in negotiating his
relationship to authority. Dumas indiscreetly tells us (though he is the only one to mention
the matter) that he abandoned his landscape studies because he fell in love with a woman and
could not resist the temptation of painting her portrait.°° It seems highly unlikely that this was
the whole story. Nonetheless, it fits the picture of capricious, indeed ‘bizarre’, behaviour that
builds up from these various anecdotal sources, and shows, at a more serious level, that Dela-
roche was profoundly uneasy both with the generic distinctions that he had to observe in order
to compete with his peers and with the studio discipline, which involved submitting to the
criticism of a particular master. He did not fit easily within the mould.
This impression can be confirmed, as far as it goes, by the disconcerting image of Delaroche
— his first recorded portrait — drawn by Louis-Leopold Boilly in his survey of The Students of
Baron Gros in 1820 (illus. 8). Among the frank and ingratiating faces of his companions — his
close friend Eugene Lami and the English painter Richard Bonington evincing considerable
personal charm — Delaroche, with his cold and prim countenance, his straight nose, thin lips
and implacable eyes behind steely spectacles, conveys the message that he has chosen to be the
odd man out. This may be a fugitive impression. But it is not fanciful to link Delaroche’s patent
resistance to portraiture, as evoked by Boilly, with the fact that he allowed his portrait to be
taken very rarely and went in for self-portraiture hardly at all (illus. 135). This refusal to
identify and promote selfhood through the portrait image — which makes him unusual, to say
the least, among members of the Romantic generation — goes hand in hand with the fact that he
consistently attempts to inscribe his identity elsewhere, through means that will be analyzed, in
a preliminary way, in the later part of this chapter.
Halevy’s second revealing anecdote, related to a painting produced in the same year as
Boilly’s survey, more than sustains an interpretation of this kind. In 1820, Delaroche completed
a commission for the Duchesse d’Orleans, wife of the future King Louis-Philippe, who desig-
nated it for the chapel of the Palais Royal, official Paris residence of this cadet branch of the
Bourbon dynasty. Representing the classic religious theme of the Pretd (entitled in the 1822
Salon catalogue Le Christ descendu de la croix), this is the earliest work of Delaroche to survive
and dates from the period when he was still enrolled at Gros’s studio. It was, however, com-
pleted without Gros’s knowledge, and Delaroche was forced to admit that ‘alone, far from the
master’s eye, he had dared to undertake, execute, not a work of study, a modest student effort,
but a ‘ableau, a real tableau, exposed to all the chances of public life’° Gros stood on his dignity
in refusing to respond to the invitation to view the secret achievement in his pupil’s studio, but

[41]
 PAWL DEAR OGHE

8 Louis-Léopold Boilly, The Students ofBaron Gros in 1820, 1820, black and white chalks.
From top left: Delaroche is No. 9, Bonington 17, Lami 22 and Roger 25.

arranged for Delaroche the ordeal of having it criticized in full class, where he was ‘indulgent
for the faults, indulgent for the qualities’.°” Having committed a breach of studio etiquette, the
precocious student was not only pardoned but enhanced in favour. When his next major work
was completed, Gros went to the studio to see it*
The Pieta is a highly competent painting, showing no small skill in draughtsmanship, which
inevitably acquires most of its present interest from the light that it sheds on the outset of De-
laroche’s career (illus. g). It takes its place in the long line of French altarpieces on the same
subject reflecting Italian Baroque influence: Sébastien Bourdon’s Descent from the Cross

|
gear_ is) pee,
DNESIGR DBTNG LEE SEL F

9g Pietd, c. 1820, oil on canvas.

[ 43 |
 PAUL DELARO GH E

(Louvre) which was installed before the Revolution in the Eglise Saint-Benoit in Paris; Jean-
Baptiste Regnault’s Descent from the Cross (Louvre), painted for the Chapel Royal at Fontaine-
bleau as late as 1789; and, most recent of all, Paulin Guerin’s Descent from the Cross, shown at the
Salon of 1819 and presented by Louis XVIII to Latrobe’s newly completed cathedral in Balti-
more, where it still resides. The young Delaroche was responding to the revival of interest in
religious painting, which inevitably marked the early stages of the Bourbon Restoration and
not infrequently involved reinvesting ecclesiastical buildings with the images that they had
lost over the previous quarter-century. But this prompts an immediate question. Why was De-
laroche, an untried painter who had so far failed to shine in the competitive climate of the
studio, chosen for this important commission? The answer brings with it quite a new perspec-
tive on Delaroche’s student years.
Both Delaroche himself and the young painters to whom he was particularly close were well
aware that there were other models available, at the time, than the Davidian orthodoxy repre-
sented (albeit in a diminished form) by the studio of Gros. There were artists who had survived
the Revolution, whose styles and reputations owed little or nothing to the prestige of the school
of David. In general, they were penurious, and their provincial roots led them to seek inexpensive
temporary lodgings on the Left Bank, not far from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, around the abbey
church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One such artist was Constant Desbordes, born in Douai in
1761, who was a friend of Girodet and initially lived in his fine property in the Rue des Grands-
Augustins,*? but moved around 1816 to the large, dilapidated, five-storey building known as La
Childeberte which stood almost in the shadow of the abbey. According to Delaborde, Delaroche
studied with Desbordes for a short time, presumably after leaving Watelet’s studio and before
joining that of Gros in 1818. It seems unlikely that he sought him out specially, and more
probable that both had converged independently on the same lodgings, where a lively
Bohemian culture almost unique in the Paris of those years was centred.*° Both Jules and Paul
Delaroche lived at La Childeberte during their student years, supported by the modest funds
that their father could put at their disposal. Only a few minutes’ walking distance away from the
family home, the atmosphere of La Childeberte was already, evidently, that of a Latin quarter,
quite different from the commercial and administrative quarter around the Place des Victoires.
Yet it was not through meeting penurious elderly artists that Delaroche secured the commis-
sion from the Orleans family. The connection came through Delaroche’s acquaintance with the
family of artists who symbolized more vividly than any other the continuity of French painting
over a century that included, but was not fixated upon, the recent revolutionary epoch: a family
of unrivalled brilliance and reputation into which Delaroche himself was later to be received as a
result of his marriage. Almost certainly it would have been Eugene Lami, his fellow student
under Gros and his closest friend throughout his later life, who introduced the young Dela-
roche to Horace Vernet. Lami, whose ebullient and charming personality has often been
remarked upon, studied briefly with Horace Vernet, whose weight of public commissions in
the early Restoration obliged him to pass the precocious youngster on to his friend Gros. He
remained on excellent terms with the eminent painter, whose frank and open behaviour to his
young friends seems to have been free of any hint of condescension or rivalry.*"

[44|
 INS GRIGBIN GLA E SEL E

10 Portrait ofCarle Vernet, etching by Louis- 11 Portrait ofHorace Vernet, engraving by Claude-
Pierre Henriquel-Dupont. Ferdinand Gaillard, 1836.

The first member of the Vernet family to achieve fame as a painter was Joseph (1714-89). His
father and two brothers were also artists, but his own commission from Louis XV to work ona
series depicting the ports of France, and his propensity for staging dramatic shipwrecks, made
him a national figure. Joseph’s son, Carle Vernet, who was born in 1758, died as late as 1836 — the
year after Delaroche’s marriage to his granddaughter — and is represented as an elegant elderly
gentleman in Henriquel-Dupont’s fine portrait print after Delaroche (illus. ro). Carle Vernet
was fashionable and well-connected, with a passion for horses, which often led him to ride in
the company of the royal family; his work in the Restoration period was almost exclusively
confined to studies of horses, at rest or in action, but he was a pioneer of the new skill of lithog-
raphy and his paintings have long been recognized as a crucial point of reference for the work of
Gericault.” His son Horace — also recorded by Delaroche in a drawing of 1836, which gave rise
to a print by Gaillard (illus. 11) — combined the extraordinarily equable temperament of his
father with a shrewd sense of the new opportunities opened up to a painter by the return of
the Bourbon dynasty. He was an old friend of the Duc d’Orleans, the future Louis-Philippe,
and his career reached a climax in the July Monarchy with his contributions to the Gallery of
Battles at Versailles. But even in the early Restoration he was successful enough to exhibit and
sell his work outside the official Salon. Stendhal, who greatly admired his battle pictures, asked
rhetorically in a newspaper article: ‘who is the only painter who, in 1824, enriches himself by his
talent and ina manner absolutely independent of the State budget?’** The answer could only be
Horace Vernet.

[45|
 PAU LD EA RO iG

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the Vernet family in the course of
Delaroche’s life: indeed his two sons, children of Horace’s only daughter, were to adopt the
official surname of Delaroche-Vernet, thus perpetuating the connection. Even in these early
years, Carle and Horace Vernet must have impressed the young painter as a result of their es-
sential independence from the system of emulation, and though Horace became a pillar of that
system when, in 1828, he was appointed director of the French Academy at Rome, he supported
Delaroche in his attempts to reform the jury arrangements of the Salon in the mid-1830s and
took a similar decision not to exhibit there any further when the struggle proved fruitless. But,
despite these strong affiliations, there can have been little connection on an artistic level
between Delaroche’s early development and the different types of panache represented by the
Vernet family. On one occasion, in 1823, Delaroche published a lithograph after a drawing by
Eugene Lami at the press of Villain, also used by Carle Vernet. Titled L’Eclatant— A Stalhon at
the Royal Stud Du Pin, it closely recalls similar works by Carle Vernet and Gericault, even to the
virtuosity with which the gris pommelé (dappled grey) coat of the stallion is rendered.*” Lami was
himself a practised lithographer by this stage, and Delaroche most certainly did not fill in for his
technical deficiencies.*” On the contrary, it seems likely that Delaroche was being instructed by
his friend in a technique with whose finer points he was unfamiliar. At any rate, L’Eclatant
appears to have been the last print that Delaroche published for profit.”
It was not, however, the first. In 1821, before his name had been made public through exhib-
iting at the Salon, Delaroche published, also with Villain, an elaborate and accomplished cari-
cature under the title Signor Tambourossini or the New Melody (illus. 12).*? It is worth spending
some time in the elucidation of this charming but perplexing work, as the hidden meanings
provide a faithful blueprint of Delaroche’s unconventional sense of artistic mission at this
early point in his career.
The manifest subject is given by the pun in the title. Giuseppe (sometimes referred to as
Antonio) Tamburini was born in Faenza in 1800 and began to appear as a baritone in Italian
opera around 1818, acquiring national and international fame in a few years. In 1822, for
example, he performed in the first production of Rossini’s Matilde di Shabran at La Scala,
Milan, and from 1832 onwards (but not before) he performed regularly in Paris. Delaroche’s
work, however, does not show the singer: it simply utilizes his name, in conflation with Rossini’s
own, to label what can be taken as an emblem ofthe ‘new melody’, that is to say, the challenging
new musical idiom of Rossini’s music, already known in a bowdlerized form to the Parisian
audience.*°
The central figure is therefore a composite symbol of Rossini’s music, dressed as a Turk no
doubt because of the opera The Turk in Italy (1814), and with a raucous magpie perched on the
end of his trumpet in reference to The Thieving Magpie (1817). But the magpie is the clue to a
wholly different signifying dimension of the caricature. Delaroche has equated the modern
dispute over Rossini’s music — compared with the classic work of Mozart and Cimarosa,
which we see trodden underfoot on the right — with the mythological story of the contest
between the Muses and the daughters of Pierus, or Pierides, who challenged them to see who
could sing more sweetly. In Ovid’s account, the nymphs agreed to award the prize to the Muses,

| 46 |
 INS 'GRIBING THE SELF

Viltaun .

12 Signor Tambourossini or the New Melody, 1821, lithograph.

and when the Pierides became abusive as a result, they were transformed into magpies, ‘the
scandalmongers of the woods’.*'
Yet a further layer of meaning has to be added, however, to make sense of the hairy seated
figure who is helping the Turk to trample on the symbols of musical tradition. Apollo, the God
entrusted with the care of the Muses, was challenged to a musical contest by Pan, who pitted his
‘rustic pipes’ against the Apollonian lyre. In Ovid, again, the impertinent challenger 1s soundly
trounced, but in this case it is one of the unfortunate judges who pays the penalty for dissenting
from the majority opinion. King Midas, seduced by the sound of pipes, is ‘made to assume the
ears of a lumbering ass’.** Delaroche represents the two metamorphoses as already having taken
place: Midas, on the right, is ass-eared, and the magpie joins the ensemble. Indeed Apollo’s
victory would appear to be far from certain, since he is speeding back to Mount Helicon with
his lyre lightly stowed and his hands clasped to his ears.
Who could be the audience for this ingenious allegory? ‘To say the least, it is not easy to work
out, depending as it does on knowledge of anew musical mode, which had only just impinged
on the Parisian public, and a more than passing acquaintance with Greek mythology. I think it

| 47 |
 PAUL DELTA KO GEE

beyond question that the primary audience was, in fact, the very social circle that I have briefly
described here: the alternative scene of artistic initiation represented by the happy-go-lucky
crowd at La Childeberte, and the elegant world of the Vernet family. Horace Vernet was in
Italy, for a short time, in 1820 and could easily have returned with first-hand knowledge of the
egregious Tamburini whose name so amusingly connoted tambour (drum). His father Carle was
noted for ‘his amusing mania for making puns and plenty of word play at every verse end’.*
Carle Vernet was also the author of a lithograph of Pegasus, and it is the mythic Pegasus who
appears in the far left-hand distance in Delaroche’s print, rearing up and about to strike
Mount Helicon with his foot.
The possibility occurs that Delaroche composed this lithograph, unique in his work, as a
result of a riotous exchange of bons mots, salted with news from Italy, at one of the fashionable
cafés near the Palais-Royal where Carle loved to hold court. But this does not stop it from being
a revealing index of Delaroche’s own mentality: on the contrary, it demonstrates the ability to
condense and transform a multitude of sources, which would also be characteristic of his future
work. Delaroche has used two prestigious and highly recognizable sources, in the first place: the
broken stringed instruments in the foreground repeat with minimal variation the motif of the
discarded viol at the foot of Raphael’s Saint Cecilia, whilst the figure of Midas recalls the
massive seated form of Michelangelo’s Moses. Are these merely aids to composition, or do
they have a more integral significance? It would certainly be appropriate for a young painter,
at the outset of the 1820s, to interpret the musical contest between Rossini and his classic pre-
decessors in terms of a comparable contest taking shape in the visual arts: let us say, between a
notion of the classic still inseparably identified with the Davidian school and a new language,
hardly yet formulated, to which such painters as Gros, Guerin and Granet — to take only a few —
were contributing in their different ways.
What would Delaroche’s own position be, in so far as it can be extracted from this litho-
graph? On the one hand, he assumes the mythological references: Ovid’s Metamorphoses was
perhaps the single most important source for history paintings, after the Bible. Moreover, his
attentive attitude to draughtsmanship and modelling shows that the references to Renaissance
masters are not simply thrown away: the confident treatment of Moses/ Midas reflects the care
devoted to the Prieta not long before. On the other hand, the stringed instruments are broken,
the music of Mozart and Cimarosa is trodden underfoot and Apollo has fled in despair from
what he judges to be cacophony. What is about to happen? When Pegasus strikes the rock of
Mount Helicon, springs will gush forth, which will provide a perpetual encouragement to crea-
tivity, the so-called Pierian springs. No doubt Delaroche is more interested in that prospect —
the new code of expression that will supersede the sterile struggle of Davidians and their com-
petitors — than in the judgement to be made on an Italian opera composer and his leading
baritone.
Without wishing to overinterpret this little work, Ishould mention a further aspect, which is
more speculative, but relates to a figure scarcely less important in Delaroche’s early develop-
ment than the Vernet clan. One of the most established inhabitants of La Childeberte was the
painter Jean-Frederic Schall, who was born in Strasbourg in 1752 and died in Paris in 1825. Like

[48 |
 DNS CoRR Ba Gee Bes bb

13 Portrait offean-Frederic
Schall at Seventy, 1822, drawing.

Carle Vernet, with whom he was on excellent terms, he stood for the continuity ofa tradition of
French eighteenth-century painting that had virtually disappeared from sight during the revo-
lutionary period but would be reappropriated by the new Romantic generation. To quote
Michael Fried, who remarks on his importance for the young Eugene Deveria and indirectly
for Manet, Schall was ‘the last important practitioner of the traditions inaugurated by
Watteau’.*+ Delaroche made a portrait sketch of Schall in 1822 (illus. 13), the year of his seven-
tieth birthday, and was held to have conveyed the effect of his ‘so lively eyes’ better than one of
his contemporaries. Are they not perhaps the same lively eyes, set under bushy brows and one
either side of a fleshy, prominent nose, that we see in the face of Midas? And if we can assume
that Delaroche did indeed use the distinguished Rococo painter as his model, is it not signifi-
cant that he refuses to look in the mirror, which would betray his ass’s ears, and continues to
listen with rapt attention to the new music?

| 49 |
 PA UI Di eA RO) Grey

In this chapter I have been so far concerned with what could be called the private determinants
of Delaroche’s early career: his family circumstances, which gave him an exceptional familiarity
with a wide range of artistic sources; his successive studio affiliations, in which he showed
himselfto be ill-adapted to the imposed disciplines and anxious to break free of the competitive
system, which did not seem likely to favour him; and finally, his developing network of friend-
ship and acquaintanceship with other artists, of the same generation and of a mature pre-revo-
lutionary vintage, which enabled him to set his sights beyond the Prix de Rome. ‘This last
development was not a passing phase but indeed the matrix of his future life: Eugene Lami
remained his most intimate friend, and the Vernet family coalesced with his own.
Yet for Delaroche to enter so conclusively upon the public scene in the 1824 Salon — just four
years after his embarrassing passage of arms with his master, Gros — something more substan-
tial than a system of private support was required. Delaroche had to tune his work to the pre-
vailing conditions of representation, and ensure that it would make its mark, without being
cacophonous. While there is no reason to suppose that he neglected the hack-work of a
student — Gros encouraged his pupils to copy his own drawings after Michelangelo, brought
back from Italy, as well as to study paintings in the Louvre and the Luxembourg®” — it is clear
that he also paid close attention to the Salon, where new reputations were being made and old
ones confirmed. In the 1819 Salon, three of the most universally acclaimed paintings were
Ingres’s Paolo and Francesca, Granet’s Choir ofthe Capuchin Church at Rome and Gericault’s
Raft of the Medusa. All these three artists were to be significant forces in Delaroche’s career
(the two last both figure in his small collection of drawings, which was sold after his death).
But how was a student to choose, in 1819, between the attractions of a small, exquisitely framed
‘troubadour’ conceit, a vision of recent monastic life employing dramatic back-lighting reminis-
cent of Dutch genre, and a vast heroic composition of shipwrecked figures which constituted a
reproach to the recently installed government? Without overdramatizing this issue of choice, I
shall argue that Delaroche saw the importance, in the years up to and somewhat beyond 1824, of
adjusting his work to different, but undeniably precise, available models. However, this was not
merely a question of expediency. What will emerge from further consideration of these appar-
ently diverse achievements is Delaroche’s consistent concern with the experience and registra-
tion of subjectivity.
Delaroche’s first strategic move, as a young painter placed within this labyrinth of possibili-
ties, 1s conveyed by the major work that he sent to the 1822 Salon, in company with the Prieta:
Joas Saved by Fosabeth (illus. 14). This was evidently the last of a number of paintings that he
produced after leaving Gros’s studio. None has survived, but another one also bears a title
relating to Racine’s tragic drama, Athalie>* Delaroche has chosen to represent what could be
called a flashback in the drama. The eponymous Athalie has usurped the throne of Judah and
caused all those with rightful claims to her position to be massacred. One child, however, has
been spirited away in the uproar and will eventually return to claim the usurper’s position. This
is Joas, and the story of the providential rescue is vividly conveyed by the testimony of his aunt
Josabeth, quoted by Delaroche in the Salon catalogue:

[50]
 INS GRIBIN G THAE SELE

14 Joas saved by Fosabeth, 1821, oil on canvas.

Je me figure encore sa nourrice eperdue,

Qui deyant les bourreaux s’etait jetee en vain,
Et faible, le tenait renversé sur son sein.
Je le pris tout sanglant.*”

Although the painting has been characterized as ‘in the manner of Gros’,’’ it is in fact much
more clearly in the manner of Guerin, who, despite being nominated director of the French
Academy in Rome in 1816, had to wait until 1822 to take up his post. During this interval, he
maintained an active studio in Paris, and it was later suggested by Delecluze that Delaroche
 PAUL Dig iva Ri@ Grn

had actually been one of his pupils.°’ ‘The amiable Guérin’, as his admirer Stendhal called
him, had made his mark with subjects drawn from the classical French theatre, especially
Racine: his Phaedra and Hippolytus, relating to Racine’s Phedre, served Stendhal as a touch-
stone for discerning the quality of ‘modern beauty’, and we may well assume that Delaroche
was reacting in a similar way if we compare the half-shaded intensity of the terrified nurse’s
face with the expression of the vengeful Phaedra.°” Guérin’s ‘theatricality’, however, deserves a
more global consideration, which is also relevant to the reason for Delaroche’s choice. Michael
Fried has drawn attention to the point in David’s career when he moved from ‘the depiction
of a single, indefinitely brief, psychologically charged and morally exemplary moment’ to ‘a far
less actively temporal mode of representation’: the example of the new mode is his /nterven-
tion of the Sabine Women (1799), where the main figures seem ‘merely to be posing for the
viewer’.”3 Guérin’s use of Racinian drama in order to induce this impression of frozen tem-
porality, displaced from the moment of action but nonetheless accumulating psychological
intensity, extends David’s change in direction and has important implications for the future
work of Delaroche.
Delaroche’s precise connection to Guerin remains open to conjecture. If he was not attached
to the studio, he may well have had close but informal contacts with some of Guerin’s pupils.
‘The Musee des Beaux-Arts at Lyon holds a small painting whose subject-matter is identical to
that of Delaroche’s Joas: Joas sauvé de la mort par Fosabet et sa nourrice, by Andre Magnin. Born
at Lyon in 1794, Magnin initially studied in his native city under the troubadour painter Pierre
Revoil, but later entered Guerin’s studio in Paris, and may well have been travelling to the
Academy in Rome when he died at Bologna in 1823. Magnin’s Joas is far smaller in scale, and
its handling reflects the jewelled precision of the ¢roubadours rather than the broad treatment of
the pupil of Gros. Its composition, however, is closely comparable to that of Delaroche, with
the cluster of foreground figures set off against a more distant scene of carnage on the right.
Magnin’s early death, away from France, makes it unlikely that this undated picture was
painted after the Salon in the summer of 1822, and a more probable explanation is that both
works derived from a common exploration of Racinian themes whose epicentre was Guerin’s
studio.
There is, however, a further factor to be taken into account in assessing why this, of all
possible Racinian subjects, should have been selected by at least two young painters at this
stage of the Bourbon Restoration. Norman Ziff notes that this is Delaroche’s first essay in the
theme of usurpation and rightful rule, ‘which could only have seemed all too topical to French-
men of the period’.°* This is a fair point, and one that suggests a possible reading (as he indi-
cates) of such later works as Cromimell, Princes in the Tower and Lady Jane Grey. The relevance of
contextual interpretations of this kind, and their ambiguity, will be taken into account, in parti-
cular, in the next chapter. But, as far as Joas is concerned, a much more precise, punctual origin
can be found in the early history of the Restoration and its reflection in the regime of popular
spectacle. On 29 September 1820, the Duchesse de Berry, who had been widowed by the assas-
sination of her husband earlier in the year, gave birth to a son, the future Duc de Bordeaux.
Great-nephew of the reigning monarch, Louis XVII, and grandson of the brother who

[52]
 INS
GC RIBING THE SELLE

would succeed to the throne as Charles X in 1824, this providential child — the ‘enfant de
miracle’, as he was called — supplied the senior branch of the Bourbon family with the heir
that they had desperately needed. From this point onwards, the iconography of the royal
child, often displaced on to the figure of the young Henri IV as founder of the Bourbon
dynasty, becomes a pervasive note in contemporary French painting and sculpture.”®
A prompt reaction to the miraculous birth in September 1820 was the decision of the
Academie Royale de Musique to put off its regular programme and invite the Theatre
Francais to mount a special performance of Athalie. The supreme tragic actor Talma played
the role of the priest Joad, who is charged with announcing the return of Joas to take charge of
his legitimate inheritance: “To this king whom heaven restores to you today,’ Swear all of you to
combat and to die for him’.” According to the Chronique de Paris, Talma’s words to the as-
sembled Levites were enthusiastically endorsed by an audience carried away by the happy
parallel between the rescue ofJoas and the emergence of their own ‘enfant de miracle’. “The
spectators, moved as if by an electric shock, all rose and stretched out their hands to the High
Priest, enthusiastically associating themselves with the oath which he required of a faithful
people.”
The shock waves would not have died away entirely by the time ofthe 1822 Salon. Delaroche
had produced a painting that congenially recollected this dynastic episode and its displacement
into spectacle. His success was sealed by the fact that it was purchased for 3500 francs by the
Maison du Roi, and became part of the prestigious collection of the Musée du Luxembourg.”®
Yet it was surely no less important to him to receive enlightened critical comments on the
artistic achievement of the work. Halevy, seeming to draw as so often on Delaroche’s personal
reminiscences, describes him during the first days of the Salon, hovering nervously in the
vicinity of the work and listening to a discussion on its merits by two people, one of whom
‘praised with warmth, with authority, certain parts of the picture’.’? Shortly afterwards, he re-
cognized that the favourable critic was Gericault. There is independent confirmation of this
good opinion entertained by Gericault, which applied particularly to ‘the little dead children’
featured in the picture. The master had picked those aspects of Delaroche’s work which were
most relevant to his own studies from the nude; equally, these were the very aspects that could
have benefited from his examination of Géricault’s style.” Delaroche did not fail to call on Ger-
icault to follow up on his eavesdropping, and developed a strong attachment to him. He visited
the painter’s studio for the last time not long before his death, on 26 January 1524, to show him
the Saint Vincent de Paul, which was to figure in the 1824 Salon.”
Delaroche’s Portrait ofSaint Vincent de Paul Preaching initiates us into the particular kind of
interpretative challenge offered by his work, and also into the practical limits imposed on such
interpretation. As regards the latter, the painting is one of the significant number dating from
this early but crucial stage in his career that have been lost, yet survive in the form of contem-
porary prints or in the guise of Robert Bingham’s pioneering photographs. ‘This means that the
development of his iconography can be tracked, even though the more painterly aspects ofhis
style cannot be assessed with confidence. With regard to interpretation, Saimt Vincent de Paul
causes one to ask how far Delaroche works through repeating and varying basic motifs — which
 PAUL DELARO CHE

15 Portrait ofSaint Vincent de Paul Preaching, 1823, oil on canvas.

are sometimes taken directly from a previous source — and how far he works through the pro-
gressive intensification of a personal thematic. Of course, these two alternatives are not
mutually exclusive. It is possible and necessary to make a formalist analysis of motifs, without
losing sight of their psychological import.
‘Take, for example, the little pyramid of parentless children on the right-hand side of Saint
Vincent de Paul. The saint designates them to the assembled court of Louis XIII (illus. 15), and
his reported words figure in the Salon catalogue: “They were alive yesterday, thanks to you; they
are still alive today, but they will die tomorrow if you abandon them’.”* For this painting, which
he was said to have transported to Gericault’s studio, Delaroche has reworked the little group of
dead children in Joas, so that instead of a heap of inert limbs we have the babies alternately
gesturing towards the benevolent saint and nurtured by kindly women; at the base, a rather
larger child, clothed but with the same precocious muscularity as the dead siblings of Joas,
clutches his top and directs out of the picture an oblique glance that catches our attention. He

154]
 INISG
Ran B IN Gr Tans BF

might be looking at us. In fact, it is only through having the manageable image in reproduction
to manipulate that we can easily verify that he seems to be absorbed in his own, provisional
contentment.
This work evidently continues and extends the motif of the rescued child adopted in Joas,
and could plausibly be supposed to follow the same ideological programme. It was indeed com-
missioned by the mother of the ‘enfant de miracle’, the Duchesse de Berry, that ‘blond,
romantic ghost’ who (in Baudelaire’s words) ‘{hovered], like a guardian angel’ over the society
of the Restoration.” But there are perhaps equally good reasons for attending to Delaroche’s
personal stake in the work and iconography of Saint Vincent de Paul. The saint had lived in
the parish of Saint Eustache, where Delaroche was born and grew up, between 1613 and 1623;
his chapel in the Church of Saint Eustache was adorned with a near-contemporary portrait,
now thought to be by Simon Vouet. Moreover Delaroche must certainly have known the large
altarpiece on the same subject by Noél Halle, in the Church of Saint Louis (now the Cathedral)
at Versailles, where his mother was born and may well have continued to possess property.”*
The differences between the two works are indeed striking enough to make it likely that Delar-
oche consciously revised the treatment of Halle’s painting, completed in 1761. While Halle’s
saint looks down from under the canopy of a Baroque pulpit, somewhat upstaged by the archi-
tectural detail of a spiral stone staircase cascading upwards to his right, Delaroche’s saint is
firmly set on a raised platform near the massive pillar of a Gothic building (perhaps Notre
Dame), with a canopied devotional image dimly perceptible in the top left-hand corner. Halle
has chosen to focus on the rich dresses of the court ladies and gentleman, with a couple of nuns
among them, but there is not a single child to be seen.
Even this brief comparison brings out a special feature of Delaroche’s historical vision,
which his later work continues to develop. He creates a sense of historical depth, precisely
by attending to the differences between the action represented and the scene in which it
takes place. Such tension is indeed often utilized to critical effect. The distant towers of
Notre-Dame look down on the scene of carnage following the Massacre of Saint Bartholo-
mew in the Rescue of the Young Caumont de La Force (c.1825; illus. 18). In the Death efPresident
Duranti (1827), another act of bloody reprisal against the Huguenot community during the
religious wars of the sixteenth century is set within a conyent; there is a crucifix visible on
the back wall, and a presumably Gothic stained-glass window of a saint, perhaps Saint
Peter, lighting the scene from the left.”
Neither this degree of historical specification nor the circumstances of the commissioning of
these various works — Duranti was painted to hang in the Conseil d’Etat — obviate the need to
examine Delaroche’s personal stake in the image, which in all three of the works recently cited
seems to reside particularly in the oblique gaze of the male child. In Saint Vincent de Paul, the
body of the foregrounded foundling occupies a horizontal axis, and therefore the gaze appears
to be directed at us, but cannot be read. In Duranti, an even more striking device is the rigid
vertical emphasis of the president’s young son, whose profile forms a strict horizontal and
whose gaze thus sheers off into the upper regions of the picture, where it meets (for the specta-
tor) the pikes of the assailants. Less melodramatic, but equally effective, is the depiction of the

[55|
 PAUL DEDAR
O CHE

4s
4¥

Diwsre Yorul “Detarsche

16 Antoine Béranger, Study No. 5 after Paul Delaroche,

taken from the Painting of the Death of President Duranti,
1827, lithograph, c. 1846.

17 Mr Horace Delaroche (at the Age of Five), 1841, oilon

canyas.

youngest member of the president’s family, a babe in arms, whose fixed expression has to be
interpreted from upside-down. It is oddly preserved in one of the study lithographs produced
by Beranger around 1846 for Goupil (illus. 16).
Delaroche continues to make use of oblique or dislocated gazes in the further stages of his
career: in Princes in the Tower (illus. 70), the mismatch of the oblique, horizontal glance of the
Duke of York and the frontal but tipped gaze of his brother forms the engaging focus of the
composition; in the portrait of Horace, his elder son, completed in 1841 (illus. 17), the child’s
tipped and lost gaze, superimposed on the steady, glazed look of the spaniel — a reminiscence
of the Princes’ pet — lends interest to a work of domestic record.”° It would be excessive to as-
sociate these repeated accents with what Norman Bryson has called, in his theoretical treatment
of ‘the gaze and the glance’, ‘sub-rosa messages of hostility, collusion, rebellion and lust’.’”
Nonetheless, there is a case for arguing that, in the works of the 1820s at any rate, Delaroche
uses such devices to signal a modest inscription of subjectivity.
The now untraceable Caumont de La Force (illus. 18) gives a fair measure of how such a
reading might proceed, taking into account the complex interweaving of historical and contex-
tual factors. Jacques Nompar de Caumont, future companion-in-arms of Henri IV, who made
him successively Marshal of France and Duc de La Force, was indeed saved from the fate of the
elder male members ofhis family at the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day (1572): the story
of his escape occupied a prominent place in Voltaire’s epic celebrating the reconciliatory
mission of Henri IV, the Henriade.” Delaroche has accordingly made the young Caumont in
his painting virtually a metonymic version of Henri IV, reproducing the well-known sculptural

[ 56 |
 INSC RIBING elle SE I

Y
I8 Rescue of the Young ( aumont de L a Force, C, 1825, oilonc anvas.
 PAU SD SISA RONG res

figure, Henri [Vas a Child, by Bosio, which had been exhibited in the 1824 Salon and ended up,
in a special silver version, in the bedroom of the ailing Louis XVIII.” But there is surely a
further, special reason for Delaroche’s choice of subject. The incident that he illustrates shows
the young boy being rescued by one of the scorers from the Verdelet Tennis Court (Jeu de
Paume du Verdelet), who initially meant to pillage his clothing, but heard the affecting
message: ‘I am not yet dead’.*° The Tennis Court in question was on the site of the present
Rue de Turbigo, close to the Church of Saint Eustache, and its name — perhaps with the story
of young Caumont attached — is likely to have been one of Delaroche’s own childhood
memories, though the scene of the painting seems to represent a composite of sixteenth-
century Parisian architecture, positioned in relation to Notre Dame roughly at the same
distance as the ancient Place de la Gréve.™
‘Lam not yet dead.” This message of the second son who is about to be rescued from under
the dead bodies of his father and his elder brother seems perhaps unduly forced and melodra-
matic if we try to put it into the mouth of another second son, Paul Delaroche himself. But we
should remember that this is a question of symbolic relationships, of what I call here ‘inscribing
the self’, and in this connection, it is not irrelevant to note the significance of the commonly
used expression ‘making a name for oneself’, as a synonym for individual fame. Up to the
mid-1820s, Delaroche did not possess ‘a name for himself?: he had the name Hippolyte, which
was his father’s name and incidentally the second name of his brother Jules; the name ‘Paul’ did
not appear on his birth certificate and possibly began as a diminutive of Hippolyte, which pro-
gressively gained use in the family circle. As noted before, Delaroche’s first studies were under-
taken in a genre which he soon abandoned, in deference to his father’s decision to make Jules the
history painter of the family. Even when this decision was reversed, he had to acknowledge the
priority of his brother by using the signature of ‘DELAROCHE JEUNE’ at least up to the
time of the 1824 Salon.
‘Making his name’ in the 1824 Salon had therefore a more than figurative sense for Dela-
roche. But what name did he now have the right to claim, as a public act of self-recognition?
In signing his little portrait study of Schall in 1822, he had used a distinctive little monogram,
‘H D jne’, so as not to be confused with his father who published his catalogues under the name
Hippolyte. By 1825, this possibility of confusion had been resolved, at least on the level of con-
vention within literary publications: of the fictional letters addressed to real correspondents in
Amedee Pichot’s Voyage historique of that year, two are addressed to M. DE LAROCHE, which
must be the father and art dealer, while one is addressed to M. PAUL DE LAROCHE.” A
further publication by Pichot, however, published as late as 1826, the Vues pittoresques de
Ecosse, reverts to the name used in the 1824 Salon when advertising ‘twelve vignettes after the
drawings of Delaroche jeune and Eugéne Lami’.
This confusion is only increased if we recognize that the spacing of the name Delaroche
could be legitimately interpreted in different ways, depending on whether the initial ‘De’ was
treated as a noble ‘particule’, which would be detached from the remaining two syllables in
common usage. The lithograph of Joan ofArc by Motte, published in 1824 no doubt at the
time of the Salon, is simply signed ‘Laroche’, in what appears to be Delaroche’s own hand.
 IN SRB
aLIN Gee SEF

In Restoration society, which was gradually and painfully sorting out the claims of noble
ancestry under a revived Bourbon monarchy, this issue of the spacing of the family name had
unmistakable implications. A relevant and amusing example is that of ageneral and baron of the
Empire called Jean-Baptiste-Gregoire Delaroche, who had changed his name to ‘Laroche’
under the Revolution, but as early as 1800 petitioned to reassume ‘his true name, which he
had only abandoned because of circumstances’: taking on board the ‘De’, however, he forthwith
decided to cut it up into three parts — De La Roche.*>
There were thus two overlapping issues involved in the orthography of Delaroche’s surname
and the style of his signature. One was his position within the family, as the son of an expert in
artistic matters and the younger brother of another painter. The other involved the inescapable
connotations of a name beginning with ‘De’, in a period when noble ancestry no longer had to
be disavowed and dubious claimants to nobility felt it necessary to confirm their social position
by adding the ‘particule’, this time for good.”° I do not mean to imply for a moment that the
young Delaroche speculated on the possible advancement that might accrue to his career ifhe
signed himself ‘De La Roche’. In the field of painting, at any rate, such pretension would have
been self-evidently absurd. But the very fact that such issues of spacing and orthography were
being raised, in the general context of Restoration ‘careerism’, to which reference was made at
the beginning of this chapter, must have invested the question of standardizing his signature
with a certain significance.
There was another, perhaps even more pressing, reason for such a move. Delaroche was in
no doubt that the most impressive painting in the 1822 Salon was the work of a painter one year
younger than himself, who had studied in Guerin’s studio and become similarly attached to the
example of the dying Gericault: the painting was, of course, Dante and Virgil and the painter
Eugene Delacroix. In Delaborde’s intimate record, the experience of Delacro1x’s meteoric rise
to prominence becomes of capital importance to Delaroche: not in the sense of inciting him to
direct rivalry, but in designating the area of limited experimentation where he himself could
hope to operate. Delaborde could hardly be more revealing about the extent to which his own
master was at the same time liberated and constrained by the frank admission of Delacroix’s
superiority. He writes of the exhibition of Dante and Virgil, that whirlwind of sumptuously
brushed colour, which must have made Joas seem timid and disorganized:
This striking action encouraged the secret desires of M. Delaroche. He thought not to engage a
struggle with M. Delacroix on his own territory, but he understood that the time had come for all to
free themselves with impunity from the classical yoke, that success could even be achieved only at this
price, and that it was necessary, at the risk of seeing oneself relegated among the disciples of adefunct
art, to pursue openly, each in his own path, the new ideal, one side of which had just been revealed.*7

Delaroche’s later attitude to his colleague, inevitably complicated by his early election as an aca-
demician and Delacroix’s failure to secure a seat, betrays a certain level of embarrassment and
even guilt, coupled with a desire to be scrupulously fair.”” In 1822, however, the shock effect of
Delacroix’s emergence must have been a considerable one: in a sense, his arrival must have been
like the return of the elder brother who had dominated his earlier studies — whose priority he
had to recognize, not engaging ‘a struggle on his own territory’. I can find no evidence that

[59|
 PAUL DE
A ROG

anything was made at the time, or later, of the Delacro1x/Delaroche comparison, in the way that,
forty years later, the similarity of the names ‘Manet’ and ‘Monet’ gave rise to satirical comment
and not a little irritation in the life of the senior of the two artists.”? But it is reasonable to
suppose that, for Delaroche, taking ‘his own path’ and distinguishing himself from Delacroix
implied, in part, settling the orthography of his signature in such a way that it would be recog-
nizable and distinctive. To put it another way, the establishment of Delaroche’s signature can be
taken as the symptom ofa process of subjectivity which had to be worked out simultaneously in
the pursuit of his creative life.
Between the Salons of 1824 and 1827, Delaroche began to sign his work invariably in the form
‘P. [or Paul] DelaRoche’. There appear to be no examples of his work dating from before 1825
that are signed in this way.”° So uniform is the practice of signing his surname in a joined-up
form, but with an upper-case ‘R’, from 1826 onwards, that works lacking this hallmark must be
regarded with suspicion.”' There is no indication that Delaroche succeeded in imposing this
idiosyncracy as a general usage: even the minutes of the meetings of the Academie des Beaux-
Arts refer to him indifferently as ‘Paul De la Roche’ or ‘De La Roche’. Shortly after his death,
it became customary for the present form of ‘Delaroche’ to be universally employed, even in the
labelling of prints after his own paintings.”
I do not wish to imply that Delaroche was attentive to the nuances of such minor graphic
differences in the way that we have learnt to be.?* On the one hand, he appears to have
selected precisely the orthography of the surname as it appears in the Act of Baptism of his
father, on 20 June 1761.”° On the other hand, Delaroche’s capitalization of the word ‘Roche’
(‘rock’) opens the way for an interaction between figuration and the act of signing, which is
manifest on several levels. In the Virgin and Child (1844), for example, the capitalized ‘R’ opens
a fissure on the surface of a large rock occupying the left foreground of the work (illus. 19).

19 Detail from illus. 133 (Virgin and Child, 1844).

| 60 |
 DNS GRL BTN Get BE Sis. F

20 Miss Macdonald, 1826, 011 on canvas.

Twenty years earlier, Delaroche did not have the ‘name’ to be sported in this self-conscious way.
But it remains true, in my view, that the very standardization of the signature marks and reflects
a process of sustained introspection that is visible elsewhere in the work.
Where then does Delaroche use the new signature for the first time? In the catalogue of the
retrospective exhibition of 1857, there is a gap between the Death of Agostino Carracci, painted in
1824 and described as being signed ‘Delaroche jeune’, and Miss Macdonald, an attractive render-
ing of the Scottish heroine bringing aid to the Young Pretender, which is painted in 1826 and

| 61|
 PAU DD) ELAR
OG Eig

signed ‘P. DelaRoche’. The former is lost and no image has survived, but Bingham’s photo-
graph of the latter clearly indicates the capitalized ‘R’ (illus. 20). It would be hard to miss the
clustering of themes of family hierarchy and legitimacy in Delaroche’s work during these
crucial years, even when the material is drawn from quite different historical repertoires.
Young Caumont is rescued from under the corpses of his father and his brother (illus. 18).
The story of the Carracci family, which Delaroche could have learnt about from the
numerous biographical sources later assembled in his library,’ also involved a family group of
three, the youngest member, Annibale, achieving by far the greatest fame in relation to his more
humdrum cousin Lodovico — the founder of the teaching Academy in Bologna — and his elder
brother Agostino, whose death forms the subject of Delaroche’s picture.?? In Miss Macdonald,
moreover, Delaroche responds to Pichot’s published suggestion that he should take a subject
from the novels of Sir Walter Scott by focusing on a Young Pretender.”
Between Agostino Carracci and Miss Macdonald, however, Delaroche paints the most curious
and revealing of all the documents of selfhood that mark these middle years of the 1820s. This is
a series of eight delicate watercolours, which have been in the Department of Prints and
Drawings of the British Library for the last half century. All of them are signed *P. DelaRoche’
and the last of them adds the date, 1825. Delaroche left just enough data, in the form of the
twice-repeated proper name ‘BASILE? written on a shop-front, to point to a conclusive identi-
fication of the literary source. The series represents successive episodes in the brief incident
described in Rousseau’s Conjessions, when the young man visits Turin, and finds temporary em-
ployment during the master’s absence in the goldsmiths’ shop of M. Basile (illus. 21—8). It has a
clear beginning, middle and end, an order that has however been entirely neglected in the
mounting of the eight individual images.
What was Delaroche’s practical intention in painting this series? It is hard to give any very
convincing answer to this question. Certainly Rousseau’s work acquired an immense popularity
during the years of the Restoration, with the result that new editions were published, often in-
corporating visual material. A complete set of his writings, in a new edition ‘adorned with forty-
two vignettes after the drawings of Deveria’, was published in 1826. Seven years previously,
there had been a book featuring ‘Views of different dwellings of J.-J. Rousseau’, which took its
text from the Confessions.” Yet neither of these types of publication could be seen as remotely
relevant to what Delaroche has provided: a micro-narrative of one relatively insignificant
incident in Rousseau’s autobiography, which is at the same time a finely tuned psychological
investigation of the author’s state of mind. Other possible reference points for a series of
images, perhaps destined to be made into prints, are no less difficult to square with the charac-
ter of the narrative. Hogarth’s various series, which Delaroche may well have known through
his father and his uncle, construct a span of years in which great moral principles can be de-
monstrated through the deeds and misdeeds of a lifetime. Rousseau’s employment with M.
Basile is a structurally quite minor incident in the unfolding narrative of the Confessions.
But if this aspect of Delaroche’s series remains opaque, it is nonetheless possible to suggest
convincingly how he came to choose this particular subject. His patron and friend at La Child-
eberte, Jean-Frederic Schall — whom I have suggested as a model for ‘Midas’ in the 1821 litho-

[62]
 UNS G Ro BN Gia EOS BaF

graph (illus. 12) — died in 1825. During his lifetime, however, he must have been an unrivalled
source for Delaroche of intimate knowledge of the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.'°° Schall’s
biographer speculates that he must have first come into contact with Rousseau in his childhood,
when the philosopher visited Strasbourg in 1765 to see a production of his Le Devin du village at
the Theatre de la Ville. Without any doubt, he was at the Chateau d’Ermenonville, where his
compatriot Georges-Fredeéric Meyer was in service with Rousseau’s patron, the Marquis de
Girardin, during the last two years of Rousseau’s life. He painted a portrait of the philosopher,
which was later engraved by Romney, and also illustrated, in a ga/ant Rococo manner, the love
affair of Rousseau and Madame de Warens in the Confessions.'*'
Delaroche’s Rousseau drawings must surely have been the fruit of his close relationship with
the elderly but vivacious painter, who could let him glimpse a kind of prelapsarian world un-
tainted by the revolutionary austerity of David and his school. This may help to account for
their lightness of touch and piquancy of observation, as it does for their apparent detachment
from any immediate, practical plan of publication. Perhaps they were simply painted to surprise
and amuse the old man. But this highly probable link should not exempt the series from any
further study. However personal their origin, these drawings, which Delaroche signed indivi-
dually, with a signature that was new or virtually new, can be seen as invaluable testimony to the
struggle for a definition of selfhood. Delaroche used the reference to the Confessions to explore
and objectify precisely those issues of authority and identity which pressed for resolution in
these early years.
The successive drawings each condense a segment of the narrative, and trace the evolving
relationship between the young Rousseau and his new mistress. ‘One day. . . as I passed quite
early in the morning in the Contra nova, I saw through the glass windows ofa shop a young lady
merchant of such good grace and with so enticing an air that, despite my timidity with women, I
did not hesitate to ofter her my little talent. She did not repel me, made me sit down and tell my
little story . . ’°* The transition from the first to the second image is marked specifically by the
erowing distrust of the commis, or assistant, who, left in charge of the shop during his master’s
absence, ‘took greatly against me’."°? Delaroche aptly slews the viewpoint round to indicate the
passage of time, and the evident disquiet of the ‘sullen’ commis (illus. 21, 22).
The next two scenes show Rousseau getting bolder in his pursuit of the seductive Madame
Basile. ‘One day when, bored with the stupid conversation of the commis, she had gone up to her
room, I hurried up in the back shop where I was finishing my little job and I followed her’ (illus.
23). Then follows the most passionate moment of the whole series, when Rousseau, unheard by
the mistress because of the noises in the street, falls on his knees to address her with protesta-
tions of love, in the belief that she cannot see him behind the door; ‘but there was there by the
chimneypiece a mirror which betrayed me’.'°+ Madame Basile’s reaction is confined to desig-
nating ‘with a simple movement of the finger’ the mat at her feet, where he would be more ad-
vantageously sited. But he stays fixed to the spot (illus. 24).
Rousseau spends a long time dissecting this delicious moment of paralysis. Delaroche
however moves on to the scene of agrand dinner, where there are so many guests that he has
to share a table with ‘Monsieur le Commis’ (illus. 25). In the midst of these festivities, M. Basile

[63 |
 PAUL DELAROC HE

,
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s, 1825, watercolour.
an episode from Rou sseau’s Confession
21-24 From aseries of ‘eight scenes tllustrating

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| 64 |
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| 66 |
 F
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[ 67 |
 PACU ED EAERAGRSOsGr Eins

arrives without warning, and loses no time in dismissing the suspicious young intruder from
the house. Delaroche shows it as a night scene: ‘I left without saying anything, but I was heart-
broken, less because I was parting from this amiable woman, than for leaving her a prey to the
brutality of her husband’ (illus. 26). Delaroche not only gives this ceremonial expulsion the
eravity of darkness, but returns to the theme when he shows Rousseau being warned off when
he passes by the shop in the daytime: ‘the vigilant commis, noticing me, directed towards me
with the measuring-rod of the shop a gesture more expressive than attractive’ (illus. 27).'°°
Rousseau is reduced to seeking help from a Jacobin monk who had been introduced to him by
Madame Basile and had taken a certain interest in him; but as he does not know the monk’s
name, his search is fruitless. ‘I prowled uselessly around the convent several times to try and
encounter him.'®? Delaroche closes his sequence not with the useless quest for a patron,
which, in Rousseau, is swiftly superseded by another adventure, but with a moment of intro-
spection outside the convent: a hint of arcading in the nearby streets tells us that this 1s, indeed,
Turin (illus. 28).
The way in which Delaroche shapes and directs this little story takes it firmly away from the
galant atmosphere of Schall’s scenes from the Confessions and makes of it, precisely, an essay in
self-definition. Authority, in the shape of Monsieur Basile, shatters the chaste idyll, and subjects
the young Rousseau to a double, indeed repeated act of exclusion. The final image is of the
young adventurer in search of another, more benevolent authority — one that 1s significantly
associated with the Church — but this is an authority that he cannot rediscover, because he
does not know its name. Delaroche’s haunting image of the young Rousseau by a church
door, absorbed in his thoughts and carrying his modest bag on his lap, is a picture of unquiet
selfhood, which is nonetheless stabilized by the very act of representation. It looks forward to
the profoundly disquieting images of Napoleon that Delaroche was to complete towards the
end of his career, investing in those highly public images no less clear a measure of selfhood
than here, in the young Rousseau’s temporary reversal of fortune (illus. 154).
As I have said, Delaroche seems to have had an aversion to self-portraiture, and the one
modest example of a self-portrait included in the 1857 retrospective raises questions of a Napo-
leonic alibi.'°? But his unconcern with reproducing the external lineaments of his person is
compensated by a desire to single out and specify surrogates for the self: they range from the
successive boy children whose predicament he highlights to the graphic formulae of the signa-
ture, reaching a stable expression only around the time of the Rousseau drawings. Recent schol-
arly writing on Delaroche, such as it is, has so completely neglected this aspect of his life and
work that we are left with the image of an impersonal technician, coldly fashioning the historical
tableaux that will stimulate a facile adulation in the French public. But this unconvincing
persona starts to disintegrate when we take into account the extent to which history, for Dela-
roche, 1s always implicitly also /is story.
In a brilliant recent essay, T. J. Clark has looked with care at the image of selfhood repre-
sented by the celebrated David self-portrait of 1794, ‘Gross David with the Swoln Cheek’, as
Thomas Carlyle called it."°* With a certain inevitability, he is drawn to the massive influence
of Rousseau on conceptions of the role of self-portraiture, for in the Confessions, Rousseau

[68 |
 INSCRIBING THE SELF

confirms that the ‘ultimate task’ of the self-portraitist would be ‘to enter (or re-enter) the space
behind the eyes’."? But how can such an ambition be judged successful, or fully realized from
the spectator’s point of view, since there is no independent referent which will allow us to judge
the authenticity of the image’s apparent self-revelation? Clark cannot find it possible either to
resolve or to dismiss this dilemma, and he turns from the intricacies of Rousseau’s ‘constant
shuttling . . . between the pure sense of one’s existence, one’s self-absorption and sufficiency,
and their embodiment for other people’’’” 3110 to examining the endlessly asymptotic relation in
traditional self-portraiture between notions of selfhood and the contrived image of the self. In
many respects, and particularly in the way in which he leads us through the sequence of the
Rousseau drawings to the image of self-absorption at the end, Delaroche also manages to
shuttle between the inward experience of the trials of selfhood and their outward manifestation,
in the form of a publicly accessible narrative tailored to his own purposes. His own image is
subsumed in the finality with which he signs, beneath the closed church door, ‘P. DelaRoche
1825’.

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 TWO

Annunciations, Depositions, Martyrdom

CIO

HIS CHAPTER will be concerned mainly with the large paintings that Delaroche exhib-
ap ited at the Salon between 1824 and 1837: Joan ofArc (Salon of 1824), Death ofElizabeth
(1827), Princes in the Tower and Crommell (1831), Lady Jane Grey (1834) and Strafford (1837). This
is not to imply that these works were more appealing to the Salon-going public, or more suc-
cessful with the critics, than the paintings of smaller dimensions. Cardinal Richelieu and
Cardinal Mazarin, which completed Delaroche’s remarkably rich offering in 1831, were cer-
tainly no less capable of drawing the crowds, and such critics as Gautier and Baudelaire felt
that it was on this scale that his talent was best employed.’ My reason for dividing the material
in such a way that this chapter and the next run, to a certain extent, chronologically parallel, is
quite simple. It is that different questions need to be addressed to this most public phase of
Delaroche’s career, and to separate the categories of work in this way will be conducive to
analytic clarity.
The shape of Delaroche’s life during this period is not difficult to characterize. Until his
marriage in 1835, he remained faithful to the Latin quarter. He had however left the ramshackle
surroundings of La Childeberte by 1824, when he gave his address in the Salon catalogue as
Hotel de La Rochefoucauld, 12 Rue de Seine.* Not long afterwards, he moved with his close
friend, Eugene Lami, to 17 Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain (the present Rue Visconti), which
was the address where Balzac set up his printing works from 1826 to 1828.° They appear to have
outlasted the occasionally intrusive presence of the future novelist, and remained at the same
lodgings until the early years of the July Monarchy. Lam1’s biographer paints a vivid picture
of the two young artists circulating in the streets with their sketch-books during the uprising
of July 1830, and climbing over the corpses that encumbered the Pont des Arts in order to be
able to witness the attack on the Louvre.* With his early election to the Académie des Beaux-
Arts in 1832, Delaroche became entitled to an official apartment close to these recent scenes of
carnage — what Lami describes as ‘the dark and damp prison that they call your lodgings at the
Institute’.> Rescued by his marriage to Louise Vernet in 1835, he set up his family home in the
elegant artistic quarter of Nouvelle Athenes, between the Chaussee d’Antin and Montmartre.
Here, at 7 Rue de la Tour des Dames, he was close to the house of his father-in-law, Horace
Vernet, and a couple of streets away from the house and studio of Ary Scheffer. Scheffer’s estab-
lishment, now the Musée de la Vie Romantique, still gives an excellent impression of the
; = agree ; , ¢
ambiance of a successful artist in the middle years of the nineteenth century.’

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 MNNUNCIALTLONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

By the end of the period under discussion, Delaroche was a member of the Vernet clan and
the father ofa family, his elder son, Horace, having been born in 1836. His own mother had died
in 1828, and his father was to follow in 1839.’ But it is surely consistent with the approach taken
in the last chapter that we should look at Delaroche’s coming of age, his assumption of artistic
maturity, in terms quite far removed from these external markers of a well-regulated career.
The young artist who was not a ‘born painter’ had had to determine, by an arduous process of
self-examination, what course to follow through the shifting sands of the early Restoration.
What we have been able to pick up so far may appear slight evidence of the process — the un-
expected complexity of the first lithograph, or the psychological subtlety of the Rousseau
drawings — but it corresponds to a well-documented sense of Delaroche’s unique authority,
acquired at an early age. Delaborde quotes the distinguished literary figure Charles Lenormant,
briefly Directeur des Beaux-Arts in 1830,” who said of Delaroche’s standing in the year of the
July Revolution:
I was amazed. . . at the authority which, at the age of thirty-three, Paul Delaroche exerted all around
him. Those who asked for his advice were numerous. . . What struck me most was the extraordinary
confidence that people had in his future; the bud had appeared, the flower would bloom.”

The conclusion to be drawn from this acknowledgement must surely be that Delaroche was not
just regarded as a very good or very successful young artist; he was regarded as a new type of
artist, uniquely related to the course that art was seen to be taking in the Romantic period. This
type, however, occupied a quite different area of the spectrum from a great colourist such as
Delacroix — the ‘born painter’ par excellence — without being any the less integrally related to
the visual culture of the times. It is important to identify this popular view of Delaroche’s
creative procedure, precisely so that its apparent divergence from more spontaneous painterly
practices can be brought into view. Eugene de Mirecourt, writing in the year of Delaroche’s
death, expressed it in these terms:
Before throwing an idea on to the canvas, he would bring it to maturity by lengthy studies, rummage
through public and private libraries, research old collections, folios of old engravings, histories of
deeds, furnishings, costumes. The knowledge which he acquired through these continual researches
became enormous. His memory was a genuine artistic encyclopedia. So much for the preparation of
the work. As for its execution, he brought to that even more study and scruple. He went over the same
work twenty times, modifying, retouching ceaselessly, even wiping out a work on which he had toiled
for whole years, ifabetter idea came up. There are numbers of works by Delaroche on which, if you
look, you can find three pictures superimposed."°

One can see here exactly how Delaroche became the prototype of the artistic approach vehe-
mently satirized by Baudelaire, in the person of Chenavard.'' One can also appreciate, reading
this painful defence of Delaroche against the flippancy of his critics, that no one has yet ser-
iously attempted to look beyond Baudelaire’s summary dismissal of the painter who ‘spends
his time in libraries’, at least to the extent of examining the wider cultural implications of the
process that Mirecourt describes. For the important question, surely, is this. As a result of
what diagnosis of the contemporary state of visual culture generally — and painting specifically
— did Delaroche decide that this was the course that his creative procedure had to follow? It will

[71]
 PAE DEA RONG ii

not do simply to say that he had no talent. Nor will it do to say that Delaroche had an acute sense
of the rupture in historical continuity caused by the revolutionary years, and felt that art needed
to make a new beginning, emancipated from the legacy of the school of David. Or rather, if this
point is made, it has to be supplemented by a close analysis of the particular ways in which De-
laroche related to his sources, given the apparent paradox that the new beginning implied con-
siderably more, rather than less, reference to the previous history of Western art as compared
with the Neo-classical artists ofthe preceding period. The way in which the faithful Delaborde
describes his sense of rupture gives some precious indications of how he thought, in a general
way, about the contemporary artist’s relation to the past, and helps to explain this paradox:

The great masters have exploited the field of poetic invention with such success, that there is hardly
more to be gleaned in their traces than a few scraps. From now on the harvest is over. Religious ideas
have long since found their definitive form . . . Outside these two supreme areas of interpretation,
what is there that remains still to be attempted? The analysis of purely human events, the representa-
tion ofthe facts from a dramatic point ofview and from their most probable, if not their most imposing
aspect. Teaching which is direct, and to a certain extent familiar — that is the best way of suiting the
conditions of modern art, and the intellectual requirements of our period.’

‘... the harvest is over” Delaroche’s statement seems to suggest that the ambitions of the nine-
teenth-century artist have been radically scaled down, 1n a way that conflicts with the aims and
achievements of many of his contemporaries. Indeed, the reference may put us in mind, pre-
cisely, of Leopold Robert’s joyful and optimistic Arrival ofthe Harvesters in the Pontine Marshes
(Salon of 1831), of which Delaroche possessed the print by Paul Mercuri.'* For the radical critic
and recent apostate from Saint-Simonianism, Paul Buchez, this work epitomized the moral
effects of the sublime in contemporary painting: ‘Under the influence of the sublime, the soul
is uplifted and extended, susceptible to every sympathy . . 2'* In the case of Delaroche, we
might reasonably think, it is not the happy harvester but the grim reaper who dominates the
proceedings. But it would be wrong, nonetheless, to dismiss Delaroche’s sober claim to social
and intellectual relevance. Paul Buchez himself, quick to detect the presence of moral failings in
art, despite technical virtuosity, quite exonerates Delaroche from this accusation, maintaining
that, in the brilliant performance of Lady Jane Grey, ‘the painter. . . has worked in such a way
that we forget him and attend only to the subject. Oblivious to the form, we want only what it
expresses’. >
We shall return later in this chapter to the interesting proposition about Delaroche’s self-
effacement from the scene, and the dividend implied for the spectator, to which Buchez draws
attention in this passage. For the moment, however, it is important to take up the issue implicit
both in the description of Delaroche’s ‘encyclopedic’ procedure, which has just been given, and
in the stern commitment to refashioning the artist’s moral role when the art of the ‘great masters’
has been irretrievably interrupted. This is the question of artistic sources, or more generally of
artistic ‘memory’. Given that Delaroche rejected from his student days the notion ofan apostolic
succession deriving from the school of David — given that he addressed himself to making his
own eclectic bricolage of elements and influences not subject to the Neo-classical paradigm — we
might well ask what was, both in detail and in general, his way of working up and developing a

[72]
 ANE NOUN GAT LONIS DE POs TT ONS, MART
YR DIO

composition. Did Delaroche simply open himself

up to the flood of iconographic and historical
materials to which his position as son of an art dealer and nephew of a curator of prints gave him
access? Or is it possible to observe systematic regulatory principles that govern his choice of
subject-matter, and clarify his way of working over a long period? If the second possibility
holds, at least as a working hypothesis, then what remains to be said about the relation to
artistic tradition, which is sustained and deepened in spite of the claim to have been cut adrift?
This series of questions goes right to the heart of the problem that Delaroche’s painting has
posed up to now. I will argue that his way of working was, indeed, systematic rather than merely
eclectic: the complex interconnections that the successive works and studies for works exhibit
over a period of time entirely belie Delaroche’s reputation as a resourceful self-publicist who
popped up on occasions, like a Jack-in-the-box, to give the Salon-going public what they
required. Moreover, the form that his art took, at this early period of achievement and
arguably beyond, represented a carefully staged recuperation of some of the most powerful
motifs of traditional religious painting. In the foregoing extract, it is noteworthy that Delaroche
associates the ‘harvest’ of bygone art with the proposition that ‘religious ideas’ have ‘found their
definitive form’. For Delaroche, then, art and religion share a common condition of being de-
mythologized. It is at the price of this negation that their energies become, at a deeper cultural
level, interfused and capable of sustaining one another.
Delaroche thus turns out to have more than a passing relevance to the recent debates, which
have sought to clarify the complex and previously neglected topic of Modernism’s disavowed
relationship to the art of the past. As long ago as 1969, Michael Fried published in his essay
‘Manet’s Sources’ the claim that, with the sole exception of Theophile Thore, no critic ‘in
Manet’s lifetime came close to understanding his involvement with the art of the past, or even
to taking that involvement fully seriously’."° Far from resting content with his initial attempt to
redress this balance, Fried has returned more than once to the issue, writing in 1984 again of
Manet’s need, as a Modernist painter, to use ‘multiple and often overlapping references to the
art of the past as evidence of an attempt both to represent a certain vision of the authentic
French tradition and to surpass that tradition’."7 In his most recent publication, Manet’s Mod-
ernism, Fried still sees it as his first priority to clarify, to a further degree, the particular way in
which past art is evoked in Manet’s early masterpieces: Déjeuner sur V'herbe, for example,
‘suggests that his use of sources was meant to call attention not merely in a general way to ana-
logies and harmonies between different works and schools but, more precisely, to repetitions
and variations, that is, to what might be called the repetition-structure ofEuropean painting from
the early Renaissance ones
It would be specious and untenable to maintain that Delaroche’s engagement with the struc-
tures of past painting in some way anticipated or influenced Manet. But it would not be inap-
propriate to suggest that this is one of the many indications that the complete dismissal of
Delaroche as a serious artist is integral to the ideology of Modernism. ‘The recent study by
David Carrier of Baudelaire as a critic makes this point forcibly. Carrier deeply disagrees with
Fried’s strategy of investigating Manet’s borrowings from the past, and emphasizes what he
takes to be the coexistence in Baudelaire’s critical canon between an art of the present, which

[73]
 PAUL DELAR @O Gi

continues the work of the old masters, pre-eminently the painting of Delacroix, and an art of
the future, which will do justice to the modern city, whose forerunner is the jaunty style of Con-
stantin Guys.’ There is room also in Carrier’s reading of Baudelaire for a foreshadowing of the
‘self-sufficient representational artwork’ exemplified by Matisse. But there is no room for the
claim advanced by Fried: that both Baudelaire, in his essay on the 1846 Salon, and Manet, in
his paintings of the 1860s, are fundamentally preoccupied with the relationship of art to its
sources.
Yet if we concede that Fried’s relentless pursuit of Manet’s sources has its point, then a
further implication touching on Delaroche becomes clear. Baudelaire’s apparent separation
between the art of Delacroix, which successfully continues the tradition of the old masters,
and the art of Guys (and Manet), which jettisons reference to the past in favour of newly avail-
able, contemporary subject-matter, breaks down before the postulate of a Manet obsessively
determined to establish his relationship to the past. And perhaps it calls into question the
device of elevating Delacroix for singly retaining contact with the great tradition? At this
point, perhaps, the preoccupation of Delaroche with what could indeed be called the repeti-
tion-structure ofEuropean painting seems suddenly relevant. A certain suspension of the conven-
tional notion of Modernist rupture makes his strategies more comprehensible and worthy of
attention.

* * *

Delaroche’s Filippo Lippi Falling in Love with his Model (1822; illus. 65) is both the earliest of his
paintings on current display and one of the most charming. Painted in the same year as the
Salon exhibition of Joas, and bought for 1,000 francs in 1823 by the Societe des Amis des Arts
after its first public showing, it could hardly be further away in style and subject-matter from
the gloomy scene of slaughtered children.*° Delaroche has chosen to represent the well-known
story, told in Vasart’s Life ofFra Lippo Lippi, which has the Florentine painter falling in love with
his model, the nun Lucrezia Buti, and finally abducting her.*' However he substantially ligh-
tened the atmosphere of this shady story by showing the nun as childlike in her reticence, and
the artist as a passionate young suitor, quite unlike the middle-aged monk recorded by the his-
torical accounts. Jeanne Magnin, who with her husband bought the work and left it to the
Musee Magnin at Dyon, claims that the model for the young man was one of Delaroche’s
fellow students in Gros’s studio, the future genre and historical painter Adolphe Roger (1800—
87). The prim young Delaroche made an appropriate choice for his juvenile lead.
On one level, the painting does indeed seem to be a celebration of an aspect of Delaroche’s art
that rarely achieves such direct expression. The young painter has broken off the sitting, his
work 1s unfinished and his brushes and palette lie casually on the floor; in the right foreground,
a battered leather portfolio of drawings bears the wittily apposite signature, ‘DelaRoche j[eu|ne’.
Undistracted by these peripheral elements, the viewer can focus on the variegated and subtle
treatment of surfaces, from the black cloak casually thrown across an oriental carpet, in the
left foreground, to the gold chain and crumpled silk shirt of the ardent young artist. Possibly
Delaroche implied a covert reference to Roger’s médaille de deuxiéme classe at the 1822 Salon, in

[74]
 ANNUNCIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

29 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Paolo and Francesca, 1819, oil on canvas.

endowing the artist with his own, partly concealed gold medallion. He can scarcely have been
unaware that the pommel of asplendid sword, whose blade is unseen, protrudes indecently ina
fashion more reminiscent of ga/ant eighteenth-century painting than the annals of the Renais-
sance.
Yet all that can be said of Filippo Lippi in this vein cannot displace the fact that it is also a
revisionist version — a metalinguistic transposition — of Ingres’s Paolo and Francesca, executed
for the Societe des Amis des Arts in 1819. This work was not exhibited at the Salon, and
indeed it was not the first painting produced on the theme by Ingres, whose related drawings
date from as early as 1816. It was, however, the first to be seen in France. Whether Delaroche
saw it in the custody of its first owners or in that of the painter and connoisseur Comte ‘Turpin
de Crissé, who subsequently acquired it, it can scarcely be doubted that this was the model to
which he was relating and reacting at the same time (illus. 29). Ingres’s painting represented the
encounter of Dante’s doomed lovers in a style closely allied to the troubadour art of the Lyon
school, and confirmed the mannered, ‘Gothic’ quality of the composition by placing it in an
intricately carved wooden frame. Delaroche has increased the surface area of the composition
by almost halfas much again, and used the increased scale partly to model his figures in a more
vigorous and naturalistic way than the elegant and etiolated Paolo and Francesca. Yet he has not
 PAUL DE LAK O GE

only retained the basic compositional schema, but has provided aptly contrasted details: the
neglected rosary of Lucrezia against the book of courtly love that falls from Francesca’s hands,
and Filippo’s cheeky pommel inverting the slender sword that clings to Paolo’s side.
In terms of the comparison that has just been made, the relationship of Delaroche’s painting
to that of Ingres does not appear to be of exceptional interest. Ingres himself had evident
sources for this treatment of Dante’s story, first of all in the line engraving by Flaxman for the
Divine Comedy (1807) — where the grouping of the two figures is, however, not the same — and
second in a troubadour painting by Coupin de la Couperie, exhibited at the 1812 Salon.** And
the chain continues, both Delacroix and Bonington producing small works on the same theme
around 1827.°> Already in the period when Delaroche was working on the painting, Ary
Scheffer had begun working on his very much larger and more dramatic treatment of the post-
humous stage of the story: announced in the /ivrets of both the 1822 and the 1824 Salons, this
famous composition of the two lovers observed by Dante and Virgil in the second circle of Hell
could still be seen as a trope on the dreamlike mutual absorption and the elegant angularity of
Ingres’s picture.*” What then is significant about Delaroche’s work?
The answer comes, I would suggest, if we focus upon the planes that close off the right-hand
sides of the respective pictures. Ingres — evidently using a squared motif for walls and ceiling,
which is drawn from the frescoes of Masolino in San Clemente, Rome* 7 — shows us the
outraged husband, Lanciotto Malatesta, entering the room with his drawn sword and casting
a sinister shadow on the lightened part of the right wall. Delaroche, who has taken care to
update his interior and shows us the Florentine convent from behind a partition, which
largely obstructs the light of day, substitutes for the shadowed wall an inclined plane in high
illumination, which is none other than the painter’s stretched canvas, perched on an elaborate
easel and neglected in the heat of the moment like Francesca’s fateful little book.
In Delaroche’s painting this interior image 1s barely legible, and certainly not susceptible to
be compared in any way to Lippv’s own style. But a surprising transformation takes place in the
fine manieére noire engraving that the English printmaker S. W. Reynolds devoted to Filippo Lippi
(the first, with Joan of Arc, of the long line of prints after Delaroche to be edited by Rittner and
his subsequent partner, Goupil).”* Reynolds quite clearly completes what had been the hints of
a red dress and a blue cloak beside a wooden projection, in the oil painting, and gives us a fully
fledged Annunciation, with the Angel hovering above a meek and submissive Virgin who bears
little enough relation to the charming Lucrezia (illus. 30).
There is, however, a reason for this odd augmentation of the original image.*? Delaborde
tells us that, following the exhibition of Joas at the 1822 Salon, Delaroche undertook his only
copy, after the seventeenth-century French painter Eustache Lesueur’s Annunciation.°° This
important work, now held in the Louvre under the title La Salutation angélique (1652), had
been painted for the Provost of the Church of Mitry (Seine-et-Marne) and remained in its
original location until the Revolution, when it was appropriated for the National Collection.
Delaroche’s copy, consistent with the new interest in religious paintings at this stage of the
Bourbon Restoration, was to move in the reverse direction, being placed in the historic
church of Villeneuve-le-Roi, in the Yonne, where it still resides.*" There is every reason to

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 ANNUNCIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

30 Filippo Lippi, engraving by S.W. Reynolds, c. 1828.

suppose that Delaroche would have been working simultaneously on Filippo Lippi and the copy
after Lesueur, and, if the image on the canvas in Reynolds’s print scarcely recalls the Italian Re-
naissance, it can certainly read as a rearrangement of the main elements in the work by Lesueur,
whose Virgin kneels at a prie-dieu in red robe and blue cloak.**
We can thus imagine a situation in which the young Delaroche, who ostentatiously signed
the portfolio of drawings in Filippo Lippi, also amused himself by citing his then unfinished
copy after Lesueur. When Reynolds came to engrave the work, he would have asked questions
 PAUL DETAR OG CE

about the incomplete image, and by that stage the copy would have been completed. Put hy-
pothetically in this form, the incident could seem like a minor instance of self-inscription, or
self-indulgence. But it is important nonetheless, in the first place because it draws attention to
Delaroche’s unique effort as a copyist, and in the second place because it 1s the first of several of
his works to foreground the motif of the Annunciation. The second issue will arise later in this
chapter, in relation to the concept of repetition-structure already briefly mentioned here. ‘The first
requires a little more comment at this stage.
‘To copy Lesueur during the early years of the Restoration was a highly significant undertak-
ing, since the work of this seventeenth-century painter was seen to offer a particular productive
direction for French art in its post-Davidian phase. Lesueur’s revived prestige in fact predated
the Revolution: in 1776 the series of paintings representing the Life ofSaint Bruno, which had
been commissioned by the French Carthusians in 1645, had been compulsorily acquired for the
royal collection and transferred from wood to canvas. Already familiar to connoisseurs as a
result of the prints derived from them, these images acquired even greater celebrity (despite
their damaged state) when they became part of the collection of the Louvre at its opening.
After 1815, however, the strategic importance of Lesueur became clear, as he was reputed to
be the French painter of the grand siecle least tainted by any foreign influences. Victor Cousin,
in the immensely popular lectures on “The True, The Beautiful and the Good’, which he deliv-
ered at the Sorbonne between 1815 and 1821, had no compunction about advising ‘young
artists, rightly disgusted with the dry and lifeless manner of David’ to ‘renew the French
palette’ by studying Lesueur first and foremost: even Poussin comes second to Lesueur in this
passionate nationalistic appeal.*3 Yet if Lesueur stands out as a ‘wholly French genius’, he is also
important to Cousin as a prime indication of the fervent belief that animated the painters of
religious works of art. He thus prompts one to ask whether it can be revived, on new terms
appropriate to a later stage of French society. ‘Naive faith is dead, but a reflective faith can
surely replace it? Christianity is inexhaustible . . 2+
There is no positive evidence that Delaroche attended these lectures at the Sorbonne by
Cousin, which, in Charles de Remusat’s words, ‘gradually gained the fascinated attention of en-
thusiastic young people’*> But there is little doubt that, whether directly or through osmosis in
the Latin quarter where he lived continuously at the time, Cousin’s ideas became a component
of Delaroche’s intellectual and artistic outlook. Looking back on his career, Halévy draws parti-
cular attention to Cousin’s concept of ‘moral beauty’, which is held to be superior to both
‘physical beauty’ and ‘intellectual beauty’, and pre-eminently a goal for artists to aspire to. ‘It
is above all this moral beauty, he writes, ‘that struck Delaroche more and more forcibly as he
proceeded towards the maturity of age and talent’3° Halévy is surely right to see the ideas to
which Cousin gave expression as inflecting the major works that Delaroche produced in the
1830s and beyond; and his conviction that Christianity had been, so to speak, both cancelled
and renewed by the circumstances of the new age supplies a key to the puzzling comments on
religion and representation that were quoted earlier in this chapter. But the Lesueur copy, and
its reflection in Filippo Lippi, suggest that, even at this early stage, Delaroche was responding to
the exciting constellation of ideas that Cousin represented.*7

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 ANNUNGIATIONS, DEP OSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

In fact, proof of the unusual ‘maturity’ of Delaroche at this stage can be found at its most
striking in the large painting that accompanied Saint Vincent de Paul and Filippo Lippi to the
Salon of 1824, and secured his reputation:
Joan of Arc in Prison (Jeanne d’Arc malade est interrogée
dans sa prison par le cardinal de Winchester). The painting, which is in very good condition and
possesses its original frame, is certainly the work by Delaroche that has received the most
detailed and satisfactory iconographic analysis, and it competes with Princes in the Tower and
Lady Jane Grey for the title of his most familiar image However, Joan of Arc does not lend
itself, any more than do Delaroche’s other major works, to a rapid and conclusive interpreta-
tion. If it is the first painting to demonstrate the features of his distinctive and original
creation of historical genre, it 1s also the first work in which the confusions surrounding this
novel achievement need to be addressed (illus. 66).
The problem crystallizes, in the first instance, around the issue of Delaroche’s use of existing
historical sources in the conception of his work, and the apparent wilfulness with which he sets
aside the written record. It is unlikely that he would have been able to benefit from the radically
new version of the story of Joan of Arc offered in the third volume of Prosper de Barante’s
Fistoire des ducs de Bourgogne, since this pioneering work of Romantic historiography appeared
only in May 1824, shortly before the opening of the Salon.” He would, however, have been able
to make use of the Histoire de Jeanne d’Arc published in 1817 by Le Brun de Charmettes. This
historian reports on a plot to poison Joan, devised by the evil Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre
Cauchon.*t° But he does not refer to any meeting between the sick Joan and the formidable
Henry Beaufort, Cardinal Bishop of Winchester. In Le Brun de Charmettes’s account, it is
Pierre Cauchon who conducts the questioning of Joan, menacing her with torture but certainly
not justifying the interpretation that Delaroche invited in his sentence for the Salon catalogue:
‘This prelate, irritated by her responses, threatens her with eternal punishment’.*"
Without adding any significant new element to this well-advertised difficulty, the issue may
be clarified by Heine’s statement that Delaroche cared not ‘for the past in itself, but for its re-
presentation’. This is not to say that he was prepared to be arbitrary and superficial in his use of
historical sources — all the evidence of his contemporaries points to the contrary — but that he
was aware of the fact that the past a/ready existed as representation. Consequently, his primary
task was to work within an already constituted representational field — the creation of play-
wrights and poets as well as painters — in order to modify and reinterpret the stereotypes. De-
laroche’s work as a historical painter, in other words, took for granted, no less than the
innovatory writing of contemporary historians such as Prosper de Barante and Augustin
Thierry, the inadequacy of existing historiographic models and the need to revise them. But
Delaroche insisted on the liberty to work in and through images: a work such as Joan of Arc
may be an accurate documentation of a scene — but that is an inadequate assessment of it. It is
in its critical and transformative use of images from the existing repertoire of historical repre-
sentation that the new image asserts its integrity.
This is easily said. But of course the very processes of condensation and displacement to
which images lend themselves are not easy to retrace in words. Let us follow one particular
track, already anticipated here. Why is Cardinal Beaufort shown in the company of Joan of

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 PAUL DEA RO Cr

\rc? And why is the cardinal depicted in this particular way? The opportunity of painting a
cardinal’s robe, rather than a bishop’s, must have appealed to the young painter: Beaufort’s
scarlet silks and the gauzy sleeves that reduced their redness to pink played their part in the
creation of a pictorial effect, which critics likened to Rubens and the Venetian school.*” But
the more substantial reason 1s surely that Beaufort is one of the leading characters in Shake-
speare’s Henry V1 trilogy, where his interventions in the destiny of Joan of Arc lead to a final,
harrowing deathbed scene in Part IT, act II, scene 3. Sir Joshua Reynolds had chosen this scene
for one of his illustrations in Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, engraved by Caroline Watson
(illus. 31).
An oil sketch for Joan ofArc, unique in the insight it offers into the early planning of the
work, shows the cardinal with the same leonine head and heavy beard as Reynolds’s dying rep-
robate (illus. 67). But even though this image was dismissed in favour of a sharper and more
malevolent profile, the significance of this connection between Shakespeare’s portrayal and De-
laroche’s invented scene remains evident. After the publication in 1821 of a modern translation
of Shakespeare’s works in Ladvocat’s Chefs-d oeuvres du théatre étranger,’ Delaroche would have
been able to familiarize himself with the original drama, as well as with Boydell’s pictorial
glosses. He would have noted, precisely, that Beaufort dies after refusing to lift his hand as a
signal of his trust in ‘heaven’s bliss’. His threat of ‘eternal punishment’ to Joan, signalled by
the pointing finger, thus has a specially bitter irony.

31 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Death ofCardinal Beaufort, detail from engraving by Caroline Watson, 1792.

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 LINN UN CLATLONS, DEPOSHTLONS., MARTYR DOM

This interpretation is incomplete, however, if we do not take into account a specifically

French development of visual stereotypes, applicable to the figure of Joan. The troubadour
painter Pierre Revoil’s Joan of Arc in Prison at Rouen, shown at the Salon of 1819, epitomizes
the complex stylistic origins and the incongruous charm of the Lyon school of artists. Both
the elaborate costumes of Joan’s dramatically disposed tormentors and the architectural detail-
ing of the vast Gothic chamber testify to Révoil’s archaeological erudition. At the same time, the
arrangement of the contrasted figures in a planar ordering accentuated by Joan’s gesture recalls
the nine years that he spent in the studio of David (illus. 32).4* A preliminary drawing for the
work indicates that the first stage of the composition involved nude studies of all the partici-
pants. Central to Revoil’s painting, and caught by the light that casts her image on the back
wall in the form of a crucifix, Joan herself adopts precisely the stereotype that would have
been familiar to the public of the early Restoration. She is the ‘Christian amazon’, familiar
since the seventeenth century and brought up to date in the frontispiece of the edition ofVol-
taire’s La Pucelle published in Paris in 1816 (illus. 33).
Delaroche does not simply jettison this familiar image of Joan. He critically transforms the
existing iconography, with special reference to the well-known engravings by Moreau le jeune
which were reprinted in the previously mentioned edition of Voltaire’s satirical work. Jean-
Michel Moreau, who had died in 1814 after a long career as one of France’s most distinguished
draughtsmen and printmakers, would have been familiar to Delaroche, not only because of the
large collection of his works in the Cabinet des Estampes but also because his only daughter,
Fanny, was the wife of Carle Vernet.* At least two of his witty illustrations to La Pucelle seem
directly relevant to the planning and execution of Delaroche’s Joan ofArc. In the first (as has
been often noted), Moreau’s indecent and anti-clerical image of Saint Denis — in full episcopal
regalia — bursting in upon the dishevelled maid, has been utilized in the creation of a very dif-
ferent womanly persona (illus. 34). In the second (not previously mentioned but hardly less im-
portant), no less a person that the Archbishop of Milan, whom Voltaire’s tortuous reasoning has
cast as Joan’s uncle, formally excommunicates her with a gesture of the hand, which recalls that
of Cardinal Beaufort (illus. 35).
Delaroche’s relationship to these eighteenth-century models should not be regarded as one
of outright rejection. Admittedly, he is repudiating the bizarre satirical turn that Voltaire has
given to the image of Joan as a Christian amazon, and trying (like his contemporary Prosper
de Barante) to recover a naive level of representation, which excludes irony. But his attitude to
the visualizations of Moreau le jeune (his future wife’s grandfather) is much more equivocal.
For Moreau has chosen to represent the moment when the young Joan is saved from the atten-
tions of two dubious prowlers by evoking the imagery of the Annunciation: the arrival ofSaint
Denis accompanied by beams oflight, which wakes the unsuspecting gurl, is indeed a sa/utation
angélique. Equally, the excommunication delivered by the Archbishop of Milan, which shows us
Joan as she has been corrupted by high living, repeats the configuration of ‘sender’ and
‘receiver’ while transforming the content of the message. Delaroche has, so to speak, conflated
these two structures in the form of a negative annunciation. The Cardinal ‘threatens her with
eternal punishment — and it is worth recalling that one traditional feature of the Annunciation

[81]
 PAUL DELAROCHE

32 Pierre Révoil, Joan ofArc in Prison, 1819, oil on canvas.

 ANNUNGIATIONS. DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

O soutune prervedle 6

Pents Urewve, lo Tearnve ve rvevetlle.

Pueelle. Cho th

Wor,
U A
ID y
Ryan5 * fog

34, 35 Jean-Michel Moreau, illustrations to Voltaire, La Pucelle (1816), engraved by Jean-Baptiste Simonet.

is to warn Mary of her son’s early death. Joan of Arc herself, however, reacts to this message in
the same way as the Virgin reacts to the Annunciation: that is, by accepting her fate and putting
her trust in God (illus. 36).
My concern is not, however, primarily with the content of Delaroche’s work, considered in
these terms, but with the pictorial structures that a reference of this kind enables him to
activate. In spatial and semiotic terms, one might say, Delaroche needs the sharp contrast
between interrogator and victim in order to reinterpret the effect of dramatic interpenetration
between ‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’ space, which is a persistent (but semiotically evolving) feature
of the Annunciation type. He has therefore mixed what remains separate in Moreau’s images:
instead of the abject Joan of the excommunication print, we have the virginal and trusting Joan
intruding in her place. There is clear evidence that Delaroche at one stage intended to open up
the space on the left that is partly blocked by the figure recording Joan’s answers: both the en-
graving of Joan of Arc by S. W. Reynolds and Delaroche’s own lithograph show a spiral staircase
descending along the left-hand edge of the image, which is less easy to discern in the painting
today.*° But the logic of Delaroche’s work has undoubtedly contributed to making the discreet
secretary, rather than the prospect of an alternative space, the most appropriate device for com-
pleting the composition. Engaged in the transcription of the words that will be used at Joan’s
trial, he is also an absorptive centre of attention, deflecting us from the witnessing of inter-
rupted dialogue to its interiorized and scriptural record.
 PAW DE aR OG bins

36 Anonymous Flemish painter, Annunciation, 16th century, oil on panel.

I take for granted that the use of the Annunciation as a pictorial type in Delaroche’s work 1s a
progressive engagement, developing over a series of works. From the copy of Lesueur and the
quotation included in Filippo Lippi to the structural use of Moreau’s prototypes in Joan of Arc is
a substantial step, and I maintain that Princes in the Tower represents another such one. But it
should not be forgotten that Delaroche’s revisionist work had other consequences, to which the
reassessment of stereotypes in the context of pictorial tradition must indeed have contributed.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that he created a new image for Joan of Arc, and de-
cisively put paid to the iconography of La Pucelle. Marie-Pierre Foissy-Aufrere has pointed out
the amusing detail that even Moreau’s Joan received a more abundant coiffure, consistent with
Delaroche’s image, in the new edition of Voltaire’s works published in 1846.47 Moreover
Ingres’s Joan ofArc, commissioned in 1851, seems to draw her solid good looks and dark,
centre-parted hair from Delaroche’s visualization (illus. 162).
Such connections may be hard to substantiate, and the further they appear to lead, both
chronologically and in terms of medium, the more hazardous they appear. But they are
worthy of our attention. In the case of Crommell, it was precisely Delaroche’s aim to provide
images of historical figures with which his contemporaries could identify, and from whose con-
templation they could draw moral benefit. The French film actress Simone Genevois, who died
in 1995 after a career which peaked with the leading role in La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc
(1929), wrote of her difficulties in fulfilling the requirements of the national casting competition

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 AN IN CON GLAT LOIN) DEP Os TTEONS, MART
YR DOM

to find a suitable Joan: ‘I did not have a sturdy peasant build, nor dark hair . . ’+° If there was a
source for this ideal image which still haunted the film-makers of the silent era, it must surely
have been Delaroche’s Joan.
Insofar as Delaroche was successful in establishing a new image for Joan, his work was also
inevitably involved in what Mme Foissy-Aufrére has called the ‘recuperation’ of the Maid of
Orleans by the royalist and nationalist opinion of the Restoration.*’ It cannot be denied that
Joan (like the young Henri IV) provided a powerful rallying point for supporters of the
Bourbon dynasty, at a time when France had just recovered from the indignity of having an
English army of occupation. But here — as with later works by Delaroche — the question is not
so much one of affirming the public connotations of a particular historical theme, which are
indeed undeniable, but of determining limits to interpretation consistent with the circum-
stances of the work’s production and its relation to the artist’s development. Delaroche’s Joan
ofArc had three owners, in reasonably rapid succession. The first, the English picture dealer
John Arrowsmith, owned the work at the time of the Salon, no doubt because he was planning
to have it engraved, together with Filippo Lippi, by S. W. Reynolds. The second, the Chevalier
Ferréol de Bonnemaison, was curator ofthe collection of the Duc (and after 1820 the Duchesse)
de Berry, and an early admirer of Delaroche’s work who compared his Saint Vincent de Paul to
Lesueur.°° At his sale in 1827, the painting was bought by one of the surviving grandees of the
Empire, a cousin of Napoleon by marriage: Arrighi di Casanova, Duc de Padoue, was still its
owner at the time of the retrospective exhibition of 1857, and it was from his direct descendants
that the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, purchased the work in 1982.
This chequered history, appropriate to the patchwork of French society in the Restoration,
also testifies faithfully to different facets of Delaroche’s growing success. To have works
engraved by so prestigious a figure as Reynolds, ‘graveur du Roi d’Angleterre’, as he was styled
on the prints, betokened success in the market of reproduced images, which would follow
without fail, as well as an attraction to the English artistic milieu, which he would soon exploit
by treating English historical themes. To be patronized by the Bourbon family and their cultural
commissars was a sign that he would acquire a steady stream of public commissions from the
French state, as indeed proved to be the case. To awake the interest of arich and enlightened
collector, himself of the imperial aristocracy but allied by marriage to one of the most politically
significant families with roots in the ancien régime, was again a good augury. Among Delaroche’s
most faithful friends and collectors were to be the two sons of the Napoleonic Marshal Clarke,
created Duc de Feltre under the Empire and Minister of War under the Bourbon Restoration.”
In this context, it is surely clear that Delaroche’s
Joan ofArc meant different things to its dif-
ferent owners: to Arrowsmith, the possibility ofa print that would appeal to the English histor-
ical taste; to Bonnemaison, no doubt, the portrayal ofa French national theme by a young painter
likely to revive the glories of the French school; to the Duc de Padoue, evidently, a contemporary
recruit to a collection that consisted almost entirely of Italian and non-contemporary works. This
does not, of course, say anything about the wider public response, in the period, to the story of
Joan ofArc and to Delaroche’s painting in particular. But it should make us chary of taking the
multiple connotations of Delaroche’s theme as stable or univocal meanings.

[ 85 |
 PAUL DETAR OC rit

eo,
Angin Roce

Feanne d Ave faite prisonicre.

37 Joan ofArc Taken Prisoner, engraving by James Thompson for Prosper de Barante,
Flistoire des Ducs de Bourgogne (1837).

This is only a provisional answer to the central issue of the public interpretation of historical
painting, which will return with new forcefulness in relation to the paintings that Delaroche
produced in the early days of the July Monarchy. Joan ofArc, however, enables us to make
progress in answering a related question, which is the place of such a work within the
spectrum of historical discourse being constituted around this time. As has been mentioned,
the Salon of 1824 coincided with the appearance of one of the most popular and influential his-
torical works of the period, Prosper de Barante’s Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, whose first
volumes were reviewed over the summer months, and which went into a new edition in
October of that year. Interwoven with the sections of the narrative that dealt with the life of
Duke Philip the Good was the ‘Story of Joan of Arc’, from her early years to her trial and
death. Delaroche thought sufficiently well of the work and its author to contribute a fine illus-
tration ofJoan ofArc to a later edition (illus. 37).>”
Barante’s intentions for the new historiography are clearly spelled out in the important
Preface to the Ducs de Bourgogne. The past is, he suggests, ‘not well enough known; it is
obscured by many systems and prejudices’. One way of combating this difficulty is to try to
replace the judgements of the previous century with new judgements and, inevitably, new pre-
judices. But the present climate will not tolerate this argumentative mode. ‘People are tired of

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 ANNUNCTIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

seeing history like a tame paid sophist lending herself to every proof that anyone wants to
extract from her. The demand is now for a different kind of history:
What people want from her is the facts. In the same way as they observe in its detail, in its movement,
the great drama in which we are all actors and witnesses, so they wish to know what there was before our
time in respect of the existence of peoples and individuals. They insist on their being called up and
brought living before our eyes: anyone can then make the judgement that seems best to him, or even
think ofnot arriving at any opinion at all. For there is nothing so impartial as the imagination: she has
no need to come to conclusions; it is enough for a picture of the truth to be retraced before her.**

A political, as well as a historiographic, programme is implicitly sketched out here. Barante, a

Napoleonic prefect who had rallied to the constitutional monarchy of the Restoration, was a
member of the small centre-left group of the Doctrinaires who lost their considerable influence
when political opinion polarized after the assassination of the Duc de Berry in 1820. They were
to regain it again under the July Monarchy when ex-Doctrinaires such as Victor de Broglie,
Frangois Guizot and Charles de Remusat (the last two memorably recorded in portraits by De-
laroche) were propelled to the highest offices of state. Insofar as we can attribute a political
position to Delaroche, it seems apt to associate him with these figures, initially little more
than a liberal pressure group, who used their period out of power in the early 1820s to
promote the drama of Shakespeare and Schiller, in new translated editions, as well as participat-
ing in the renewal and revivification of historiography.
Yet, in addition to this general point, the evident structural kinship between Barante’s histor-
ical approach and Delaroche’s procedure should be stressed. Barante wishes to remove ‘systems
and prejudices’, which obscure the past, to bring peoples and individuals ‘living before our eyes’.
In practice, this implies refraining from the sophisticated ironies, and from the philosophical
judgements, of eighteenth-century historiography. A narrative style that is based, like a
transfer, on the ‘naive’ chronicles of the later Middle Ages becomes Barante’s unique resource.
By comparison, Delaroche’s transformative approach to the images illustrating La Pucelle could
be seen precisely as an evacuation of irony — and the corrosive anti-ecclesiastical bias that Vol-
taire’s mock-epic conveys — in favour of an image that is almost banal in its simplicity: ‘a picture
of the truth’.
It is easy to retort, from our own point of view, that ‘truth’ does not come in ‘pictures’, but in
the critical sifting of all available evidence (a process that, for the story of Joan of Arc, had only
just begun in the 1820s and was to gather pace with the full publication by Quicherat of docu-
ments relating to the trial).°* But the response to this point is also easy. It was precisely in the
cultural and epistemological matrix of the Romantic period that the test of truth in historical
discourse came to seem more a matter of ‘pictures’ than of ‘judgements’. Even, perhaps parti-
cularly, today, this proposition is not self-evidently ridiculous: the Dutch philosopher ofhistory
Frank Ankersmit has argued persuasively that we can learn how to understand historical repre-
sentation primarily on the basis that ‘the text assumes the form of a “picture” of the past’? But,
in relation to our understanding of the Romantic epoch, awareness of the convertibility
between the image, albeit arrested in time, and the historical narrative, considered as a
‘picture’ ofthe past, is of primordial importance. Barante had to fashion his account by a con-

[87]
 PAUL D Ei AR O GEE

trived process of stylistic self-effacement: ‘She was the daughter ofa poor peasant; she had been
raised according to her state, but in extreme piety . . ”°° And so on, until Joan’s imprisonment,
trial and death. Delaroche could work to transform the meretricious models of his predecessors,
not through a steady additive process, but through the imaginative force condensed in a single
image. But just as for Barante, the picture was the double face of narrative, an alibi with an
authenticating effect, so too for Delaroche the narrative was the double face of the painted
image; and as a structuring device it became increasingly important to him.
‘The appearance of Joan ofArc at the Salon of 1824 had established Delaroche’s reputation as
one of the brightest stars of the new generation of artists. The remaining years of the decade
were devoted to a process of self-development, which had, inevitably, two sides to it. Delaroche
was still absorbing and reflecting upon the varied impulses to which he had been exposed in his
student days, and fashioning a self in the same process: the Rousseau drawings are proof
enough of this. At the same time, he was being drawn inevitably into the public world of patron-
age and commissioning agencies. He was also becoming aware of the particular challenge that
he faced as a prominent member ofa generation of painters not devoid of other star performers.
If Delaborde is probably right in asserting that Delacroix was, from 1822 onwards, his arch-
rival, there were several other young painters who stimulated competition: not, however, in
accord with the emulative system of the Davidian school, but in a new context where the colour-
ful treatment of exotic and surprising subjects was reaching unparalleled heights.
It is a reasonable assumption that Delaroche took time to work through these varying pres-
sures. Only with the remarkable series of pictures that he contributed to the Salon of 1831
(Princes in the Tower, Cromwell, Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin) did he reach the peak
of his form. This can be said even though the opportunities to see most of the major paintings
of the previous years are strictly curtailed, either because (like the Death ofPresident Duranti)
they have been destroyed or because they are not now made available for public view (the
works stored at Versailles, such as the Taking of the Trocadéro and the Duc d’Angouléme).*7
Although aspects of some of these works are worth taking into account — and will be discussed
ina later chapter — they lack the memorable concentration and originality of his more important
achievements. One major painting from these years, however, cannot be ignored. The Death of
Elizabeth, Queen ofEngland, in 1603, a late entrant in the 1827/28 Salon, has always been one of
Delaroche’s most contested works. But it marks a new stage in the elaboration of his method,
integrally linked both to the fact that he was now using English sources, and to the virtual cer-
tainty that he had checked them in their country of origin.
Though the dearth of biographical information on Delaroche’s life in the 1820s makes it hard
to be more precise, there seems no reason to dissent from the view that he visited England in
1827, and the late completion of the Death ofElizabeth, dated 1828, seems to confirm that the
work was delayed by this visit.>* In one sense, it is surprising that he did not make the journey
sooner. Delacroix was in England in 1825, and saw Bonington — the former fellow student of
Lami and Delaroche — while improving his knowledge of the English Romantic poets. Dela-
roche had had the stimulus of John Arrowsmith’s patronage after the 1824 Salon, and the privi-
lege of Pichot’s fictional letter from Scotland, inviting him to venture into themes from the

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 ANNUNGIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

38 Illustration to Walter Scott, The Abbot, lithograph by Eugéne Lami, in Amédée Pichot,
Vues pittoresques de I’Ecosse, Paris, 1826.

novels of Sir Walter Scott. But he does not seem to have responded quickly to the lure of local
colour. The vignette that he contributed to Pichot’s Vues pittoresques de I’Ecosse (1826) purport-
edly represents a fight in the streets of Edinburgh, recounted in Scott’s The Abbot (illus. 38).°? It
appears however to be virtually identical to the lithograph published after his sketch by Villain
in 1829, which is identified as ‘Saint Bartholemew’s Day’.”°
Whether or not this was a direct result of his visit, Delaroche’s Death of Elizabeth reflects the
use of a significant English source: it is closely related to the print of Queen Elizabeth Appointing
her Successor, completed by James Neagle after the painting by Robert Smirke over twenty years
before. It is particularly important to recognize that this was a work constrained to its purpose
as historical documentation. It formed part of the gallery of images commissioned by Robert
Bowyer for his embellished edition of Hume’s History of England, which was announced in a
prospectus of 1792 and abandoned in 1806 after massive losses had been incurred by the pub-
lishers."’ There is no reason to suppose that Delaroche would have seen the original painting,
but Neagle’s (reversed) print unquestionably forms the basis of his own composition, and there
is an extract from Hume’s History ofEngland published in the Salon catalogue (illus. 39).°*
Using this comparatively esoteric image as his prototype was certainly not the same as refer-
ring to Moreau le jeune, and capping Revoil, in the preparation ofJoan of Arc. Delaroche was
not working on existing stereotypes but, on the contrary, borrowing a striking composition,
which would have been largely unknown to the French public: indeed, a few years later, when
Delaroche supposedly used a parallel source for his Lady Jane Grey, he was accused of a
measure of deception.” It is comparatively easy for us to shrug off these accusations, inured as
we are to the ways in which ‘high art’ enhances ‘low art’, from Cubism to the work ofa Pop artist
such as Roy Lichtenstein.°* Neagle’s print is indeed a crude and dull affair, compared with the

[ 89 |
 PAUL DEDAR OGEE

39 Robert Smirke, Queen Elizabeth Appointing her Successor, engraving by James Neagle, 1796.

spectacular display of high sheen and brilliant colour in Delaroche’s painting (illus. 68). But,
even if we dismiss the accusation of dishonest practice, we have to look further at the particular
justification that Delaroche might have had, or believed he had, for covering his canvas with
larger-than-life figures in a stunning variety ofsilks, velvets and furs.
Part of the answer surely lies in the fact that the Salon of 1827/28, the first to take place since
1824, was pre-eminently an occasion for artists to show off their skills in using colour. Dela-
croix’s Sardanapalus (whose subject was the fruit of discovering Byron on his English trip)
blazed from the wall, but was not in all probability the achievement with which Delaroche
desired to compete: it was not a painting likely to be acquired by the state, and indeed did not
enter the collection of the Louvre until nearly a century later, in 1921. But the Birth of Henri IV,
by a painter eight years younger than Delaroche, Eugene Deveria, was a different affair. Even
larger than Delaroche’s Elizabeth (4.84 < 3.92m, as opposed to 4.22 X 3.43m), it celebrated the
father of the Bourbon dynasty whom Delaroche had evoked only by implication in Caumont de
La Force. It placed the tiny baby with a great destiny at the centre of a swirling display of har-
monious, soft colour, reminiscent of Veronese’s Marriage of Cana, which, for the Romantic
generation, was one of the most prominent imperial additions to the collection of the Louvre.
Delaroche is reported to have insisted on receiving as high a price for Elizabeth as Deveria

[go |
 ANNUNEIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

received for Henri [V, when both paintings were purchased from the Salon for the State collec-
tions, and both artists eventually received the same sum of 6,000 francs.°5
It is perhaps an appropriate judgement on this rivalry that both paintings have, for some
years past, been hung adjacent to the Grande Galerie, so highly placed on the wall that virtually
nothing of them can be seen in detail. What strikes one, nonetheless, is the remarkable differ-
ence in their chromatic values. It is easy to appreciate Deveria’s cult of the Venetian painters,
particularly Veronese.”° By contrast, Delaroche has been led to a quality of finish that may
have Dutch antecedents, and may reflect examples of Tudor portraiture seen on his visit to
England, but certainly overloads the painted surface and makes it seem ugly and garish.
Henri Delaborde, who probably became a pupil and friend of Delaroche around the time of
the 1827/28 Salon, was in no doubt that the work was an aberration. He wrote, sensibly enough,
‘It is in front of the Death ofEhzabeth that we sense the abuse of the method [of Delaroche’s
painting], and the gaze is as if bemused by a kind of picturesque fracas. Luckily M. Delaroche
was not the sort of person to be in error for long’°” Stendhal was less censorious, by implication,
when he listed the work with the subsequent Cardinal Richelieu as two of the paintings that
could find ‘no comparison’ in the much less lively field of contemporary Italian art; and this
juxtaposition suggests that what was valuable about the technique of the Death of Elizabeth
could be refined without risk of ‘fracas’ on a much smaller scale.”
Alexandre Dumas, however, is perhaps the most revealing critic of the Death of Elzabeth, in
his very dismissal of the work. He writes, ‘Everyone stopped before Elizabeth, greenish, dying,
already up to the waist in the tomb. But I stopped in front of the young Scottish girl [Miss Mac-
Donald], ravishing in its feeling, adorable in its poetry’? Even Dumas’s aspersions point to the
fascination that the work held for the Salon audience, and perhaps show the reason for
Delaroche’s choice of the motif of the dying Queen who refused to go to her bed, and lay
beneath her precious coverlets as though her frail and shrinking body was already seeking to
rejoin the earth. This is not a Deposition in the classic style of Delaroche’s Pieta of 1820 (illus.
g). Stephen Duffy has very plausibly suggested that the model may be Caravaggio’s original var-
iation on the traditional motif in his Death ofthe Virgin, held in the Louvre and notable for the
grief of the attendant apostles. Delaroche’s configuration of courtiers and ladies-in-waiting lends
a similar grieving anxiety to the death of the Virgin Queen, as her body begins its metamorpho-
sis. Much later, in the religious paintings of his late career, he was to return to showing the female
body dissimulated under the folds ofits clothing, and obliterated before the purity of light.

At this stage I wish to clarify the status of the terms of Annunciation and Deposition as they are
being applied here. This is however no easy task. Our vocabulary for describing the ways in
which pictorial structures are transmitted with a significant change, indeed a radical revision,
of iconography is severely limited. There is no problem with defining a ‘copy’, as with Delaro-
che’s version of the Salutation angélique of Lesueur (though, of course, the cultural and histor-
ical context in which a copy is made is an aspect of its meaning, in this as in any other case).
There is relatively little difficulty with the concept of ‘quotation’, as when Delaroche ‘quotes’

[91]
 PA LD EE AVR Or Gis

the Annunciation, which he had ‘copied’, in Filippo Lippi (though the self-referential aspect of
this particular example poses problems of its own). But to speak of Joan ofArc as an Annuncia-
tion, and the Death of Elizabeth as a Deposition, with whatever qualifications, poses an issue that
needs to be confronted directly. Having earlier referred to Fried’s concept of the ‘repetition-
structure of European painting’, I must now consider what, precisely, is beng repeated, at the
structural level, in these works.
One way of proceeding — which will indeed be relevant to my analysis of Delaroche’s late
religious paintings — would be to replace these terms, which have inescapable religious conno-
tations, with semiotic equivalents. That is to say, the motifs of the angel appearing to Mary and
the body of the dead Christ being lowered from the Cross (the events marking the beginning
and the end of Christ’s earthly life) would be replaced by terms denoting the typical treatment
of the two motifs within the spatial coordinates of a rectangular picture.”° In a necessarily over-
simplified fashion, we could talk of two characteristically different articulations of the picture
space in relation to the framing edge: on the one hand, the irruption — most often from left to
right — of the Angel into Mary’s domestic space; on the other, the downward pressure of the
weight of Christ’s body, which draws attention to the horizontal boundary of the bottom of
the canvas. These two different articulations could be expressed very simply in the form of
two arrows defining dynamic movement, as it is implied in the composition: one from left to
right, beginning at the left-hand, vertical edge, and another ending at the bottom horizontal.
One could go further and say that both these directional arrows are also indices of a space that
we do not, and cannot, see in the composition: the Angel’s arrival testifies to the otherness of the
heavenly realm, which is momentarily in contact with the earth, and the declining body of
Christ to the sealed tomb in which it will lie for a while (illus. 40).
Without, at this stage, defending the relevance of this very simple analysis to the develop-
ment of Delaroche’s work, I should however like to incorporate a further extension of the
argument, which relates especially to the ‘annunciatory structure. It goes without saying that
the Annunciation, as a pictorial type, had declined to a point of nullity in the course of the se-
venteenth and eighteenth centuries. By the same measure, a different articulation of space had

40 Semiotic diagram (drawn by Philip Steadman).

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 MIN UN GLALTTONSS DEPOSTTONS. MARTYRDOM

developed in the post-Renaissance tradition, equally concerned with transition from one space
to another, in this case not from the heavenly to the earthly, but from the spectator’s space to
that represented in the canvas. Alberti is perhaps the first to articulate in theoretical terms the
need for a ‘witness’ figure, whose role is to mediate between the real and the represented world,
‘pointing out what is dangerous or what is to be admired’.”" Poussin no doubt provides the ar-
chetype of this liminal figure when he places, at the extreme left-hand edge of hisManna, a tall
figure with his hand raised in wonderment, who draws our attention to the miraculous provi-
dence being visited on the starving Israelites.””
The difference between this mechanism and that of the Annunciation is easy to appreciate. I
would argue, however, that the traditional relationship implied by the presence of the witness
figure — whom we are to understand as a participant both in our space and in the scenography of
the composition that he helps us to interpret — is radically reinterpreted by Delaroche’s im-
mediate predecessors in such a way as to recall the spectator to the wholly different pictorial
type of the Annunciation. In other words, the transition between spaces no longer serves to in-
corporate the spectator into the scenography. Both the space that we see and the space from
which the ‘witness’ proceeds are now equally alien to us; this is not, however, because the
unseen space is the metaphysical space of ‘heaven’, but because both spaces are characterized
as the spaces — the ‘on’ space and the ‘off space — of history.
By this assertion I am implying that historical painting, of the kind associated with Dela-
roche, acquires its special novelty not from the subject-matter alone but from the unprece-
dented articulation of space(s) in relation to historical subject-matter. I am also implying a
rupture in the post-Albertian, Poussinesque tradition of French painting, which consists pre-
cisely in the overdetermination of ‘historical’ space as a space radically other, and excluding the
mediation of the witness figure. The only way of breaking into this space, the way that needs to
be signalled in order to stress its otherness, is through the effect of surprise. As with the Angel
of the Annunciation, it must be an irruption.
I will not expatiate here on my reasons for saying that the painters of the Lyon school — the
despised “Troubadours’ — were, together with their close friend and ally Granet, largely respon-
sible for this exceptional new coding of historical space.’? A token of this achievement, however,
lies in a small painting, which I believe was no less important to Delaroche than it was to his
colleague in Gros’s studio, Richard Bonington. Pierre Revoil’s Henry IV Playing with his
Children, shown in the Salon of 1817, in effect demonstrates an encounter that is pure surprise
—a visible enactment of what the Russian Formalists called ostranenie, or ‘making strange’. The
Spanish ambassador who lifts his hand in astonishment before the spectacle of the king giving a
piggyback to his children is generically, we could say, a figure of transition; but far from telling us
‘what is to be admired’, he is caught, with the king, in the mutual embarrassment of a diplo-
matic faux pas. The spectator can only pose as a belated eavesdropper. Bonington’s equivalent,
the lively oil called Henry [Vand the Spanish Ambassador (1827; Wallace Collection), supple-
ments the astonished ambassador with a page-boy, who pulls back the curtain from the door
of entry, revealing through a blush of light an ‘off space far more mysteriously suggestive than
the threshold meticulously recorded by Revoil. Largued earlier that Delaroche’s Joan of Arc re-

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 PAUL DEAR OG EE

flected, in its camouflaging of the stairway space, an unrealized intention of making the secre-
tary a liminal figure, in much the same way as the doorkeeper in Fleury Richard’s Tasso and
Viontaigne (1821). Like Bonington, though in his very different idiom, Delaroche was able to
use troubadour painting to aid his own rites of passage, from the still unresolved articulation of
space in Joan of Arc to the achievement of the Princes in the Tower (illus. 70).

Delaroche’s Princes in the Tower (its full title in the Salon catalogue being Edouard V, roi mineur
d’Angleterre, et Richard, duc d’Yorck, son frere puiné) is probably his best-known picture, and the
culmination of his early development. Exhibited for the first time in 1831, at the initial Salon of
the July Monarchy, it was certainly conceived a few years earlier. Delaborde, who may indeed
have served as the model for Edward V,”* describes it as having been completed ‘long before’ the
Revolution of July 1830,7° and the most plausible hypothesis is that Delaroche generated the
ideas related to it in the course of his visit to London in 1827. Indeed, a curious note in the
Illustrated London News from 5 February 1848 implies that the desire to gain local knowledge
on the historical aspects of the composition was one of the prime motivations of that visit.
The writer claims:

The costume ofthe Princes, the bedstead, and its draperies, were carved and made in England, from
the best authorities, under the superintendence of Delaroche who came expressly to London to visit
the scene ofhis picture.”°

Improbable though this account may appear, it is certainly possible that Delaroche undertook
this errand. Around 1830, furniture of the kind could have been made up in London, either in
the late medieval style or incorporating genuine old woodwork.’” Moreover, it is well attested
that, for the figures of the two princes, Delaroche modelled plaster effigies, a practice that also
extended to other compositions undertaken in this period. Godde writes of a maquette being
completed 1n 1828, which would accord well with the impression of a long period of gestation
and planning for the work.”
Delaroche’s other contemporary three-dimensional work and its implications will be consid-
ered in the next chapter. Speaking of the final form of the Princes in the Tower, however, Godde
adds a further important point. “The composition was originally taller than it was broad [en
hauteur|, and it was after having sketched it out that Paul Delaroche resolved to treat it in
breadth: he had around 65 cm of canvas sewn on to each side.’” What modifications of the
original composition would have been required to accommodate this new broad format? In
the absence of preparatory drawings, Delaroche has at least left behind two variations on the
composition of the picture exhibited in 1831, but it is not certain that they help to resolve the
issue. As late as 1852, he painted a large revised version, and at least one small replica, under a
new title, now known as Children ofEdward IV Praying in the Tower.*° In this work, the praying
children are separated, and the Duke of York is seen in profile (illus. 41). Much closer in period
is the print signed ‘1831 Paul De la Roche’, of which only one copy exists; here both princes are
facing inwards, absorbed in prayer (illus. 42), but the accessories — carved bed and illuminated

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 DON SON GUAT VOINS. OS PO SLT TONS. MARTYRDOM

Sigh
ie
XN

41 Children ofEdwardIVPraying in the Tower, 1852, oil on canyas.

42 Princes in the Tower, 1831, unique lithograph.

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 PAUL DELAROCGHE

book — do not figure at all. Either of these configurations could be fitted into a composition en
hauteur. But if Godde’s point about the symmetrical addition of canvas on each side is taken
seriously, it is clear that the composition as we have it in the 1830 version must have been
quite substantially reworked. What would not have been included, before the widening of the
canvas, would be the prolongation of the bedhead at the extreme right-hand side and, in parti-
cular, the door on the left, with its fateful beams of light (illus. 70).
Another guide to the development of Delaroche’s composition can be found in the English
source, which, like the Neagle engraving for the Death ofElzabeth, must have been a crucial
element in its genesis. With his connections to Arrowsmith and the English printmaking
world dating back at least as far as 1824, Delaroche would surely not have needed to visit
London in order to be familiar with a major series of historical prints, no less famous than
Bowyer’s History ofEngland series, which had been published in the 1790s by the brothers
Boydell under the title of The Shakespeare Gallery. On the 1827 visit, he may even have met
one of its most longlived contributors, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s old pupil James Northcote. With
his penchant for elderly artists whose roots were firmly planted in the eighteenth century, De-
laroche might have appreciated the brilliant conversationist, whom Hazlitt vividly described as
‘the last of that school who knew Goldsmith and Johnson’.*" Certainly he took as his major re-
ference point for the Princes in the Tower Northcote’s striking evocation of the scene from King
Richard ITT (illus. 43).
The comparison of Francis Legat’s engraving of Northcote’s work with Delaroche’s Princes in
the Tower is, however, much more illuminating than that between Smirke’s image and the Death
ofElizabeth. Northcote appropriately offers a version that corresponds in all respects to Shake-
speare’s text. He makes manifest what James Tyrrel, deputed by Richard III to arrange the
murder, puts in the mouths of the two assassins, Dighton and Forrest, as they contemplate
their innocent victims:
‘O, thus, quoth Dighton, ‘lay those tender babes:’
“Thus, thus, quoth Forrest, ‘girdling one another
Within their innocent alabaster arms:
Their lips were four red roses ona stalk,
Which in their summer beauty kiss’d each other.
A book of prayers on their pillow lay . . 7°

Northcote visualizes the sleeping princes as Reynoldsian children, overshadowed by the brutal
faces of their murderers, who lift the coverlet as a prelude to smothering their victims. The in-
tegration of these starkly opposed registers of physiognomy within a scenography of fitful lights
and swirling curtains betrays his devotion to the Venetian school, especially Titian. It is,
however, a tapestry which Delaroche has carefully picked to pieces, in order to reassemble it
ina very different fashion.
This reconstitution goes a long way beyond the quasi-archaeological research implied by the
writer in the ///ustrated London News. Delaroche certainly presents the evidence of having con-
sulted expert opinion, and undertaken a detailed study of late Gothic costume and furnishings.
The elaborate door-lock on the left (easily visible in the contemporary photograph of illus. 44)

| 96 |
 ANNUNGIATIONS, DEP OSTTIONS, MARTYRDOM

SUAKSP RARE
ye J

43 James Northcote, Scene from Shakespeare’ Richard I], 1790,

engraving by Francis Legat.

suggests an acquaintance either with the collection of Alexandre du Sommerard, soon to be

made public in the Musée de Cluny, or with the London antiquarian milieu in which Pugin
worked: Delaroche’s posthumous library contained an edition of Pugin’s Dessins et serrurerie
des X Veet X Ve siécles, published in 1836.** But ofadifferent order is the imaginative translation
of Northcote’s motifs into new and rhetorically more persuasive equivalents. Northcote’s
swathe of curtain is embroidered with the monogram ‘E V R’ above a motif of intertwined
roses (doubtless picking up Shakespeare’s metaphor), and the royal arms of England quartering
those of France. Delaroche has allowed the young King only the self-indulgence of a crude
carving on the bedstead, ‘King Edward V’. Beneath this inscription, however, is a series of
painted shields bearing the arms of England and France on a divided ground of red and blue.
Also noticeable as an aspect of the heraldic symbolism of the painting is the series of
emblems carved on the two columns of the bed: the rose, the ostrich feathers of the Princes of
Wales, and the portcullis of the Beaufort family. Since this collection of motifs has called forth
one of the very few modern discussions about Delaroche’s paintings, it is worth quoting Sir Roy
Strong’s judgement on the matter: ‘So compelling is Delaroche’s evocation that the viewer

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 PAUL DELAROCHE

DELAROCHE
VIE SOHNE EOUARDS,
ANTS 0'EDOUARI THE CRILDREN Of

SHAURR, Boy

44 The Children of Edward (Princesin the Tower), photograph by Gustay Schauer, 1861.

never notices that the columns of the bed are inappropriately carved with the Beaufort portcul-
lis and the Tudor rose’."> Undoubtedly Delaroche does appear to be anticipating, for whatever
reason — and a possible reason will be adduced later — the arrival of the Tudor dynasty in the
person of Henry VI, who used the portcullis derived from his Beaufort ancestors as a royal
device. It is perhaps flippant to say that the painter who was willing to put Cardinal Beaufort
in the place of the Bishop of Beauvais might have chosen to foist the Beaufort device on the poor
princes, for old times’ sake — but not quite so frivolous to suggest that the portcullis, connoting
the death of the Cardinal in Reynolds’s frightening image (illus. 31), might have lent an addi-
tional ominous note to the incipient slaughter of the innocent.
At any rate, Strong’s simple schema accords only with a fairly superficial reading of the
picture, in which the effects of illusionism (the ‘compelling . . . evocation’) are punctured by
the pinpricks of critical doubt. Admittedly the likelihood that pedantically exact, even though

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 AN NOUN CEATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

sometimes misplaced, observations might impugn the thoroughness of the artist’s research was
an occupational hazard for the historical painter in a period when new standards of historical
criticism were being intensively applied. Delaroche had more reason than most to know that
the most scrupulous investigation of original sources was not proof against those who took
their own estimation of verisimilitude for proven historical fact.*° But Delaroche’s practice in-
corporates more aspects than mere illusionistic effect combined with the work of preliminary
research into the milieu of a period, which serves (ambiguously, it must be said) as a critical
alibi. It is, for one thing, based on a gradual accumulation of motifs, which, drawn originally
from other painters in many cases, acquire a new significance in terms of Delaroche’s personal
history. The triangular grouping that he has devised for the position of the two princes (as
opposed to Northcote’s intertwining of the parallel sleeping bodies) recalls the lovers in
Ingres’s Paolo and Francesca, and their revision in Filippo Lippi (illus. 65). The elder prince’s
tilted gaze evokes the prominent child who solicits our attention in Saint Vincent de Paul and
the rescued younger son in Caumont de La Force (illus. 18). Although we can say that Delaroche
has worked hard to distance himself from Northcote’s image — conceived essentially as an illus-
tration to Shakespeare — it would be wrong to imagine that, for him, historical painting existed
outside the domain of representation or, in other words, that it could cut itself off from the
history of the repetition of forms.
This general point brings up the issue that my earlier analysis of Delaroche’s works and my
preliminary discussion of Revoil’s Henri JV have emphasized. How useful is it to see the Princes
in the Tower as a repetition of the structure of an Annunciation, or more precisely, a revision of
the use of the Albertian witnessing principle, in such a way as to create an irruptive tension
between the space of the picture and another, by definition, inaccessible space? Certainly, the
enlargement of the canvas in the way described by Godde gives the work roughly the same pro-
portions as Henri IV (illus. 45) and substitutes for Revoil’s open door the firmly shut door of the

45 Pierre Révoil, Henri [V Playing with his Children, 1817, oil on canvas.

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 PAUL DELARO
CGH E

princes’ bedchamber, with the effect that the surprise irruption is anticipated rather than
depicted. But the chain of looks that leads us leftwards from the eyes that confront us to the
averted gaze near by, and to the attitude of the pet spaniel so alert with apprehension, creates a
mood of suspense at once more understated and more powerful than in Revoil’s case. ‘This
point recalls the descriptive analysis of Delaroche’s teacher, Gros, who was notably enthusiastic
about his pupil’s achievement: ‘What expression in these two children! What wit! what intelli-
gence in the little dog who looks and listens so well?’ As an exercise in irruptive tension,
Revoil’s isolation of the moment when the surprised ambassador confronts the encumbered
sovereign is a crude metaphor for the illumination and disclosure of the historical scene. In De-
laroche’s work, the process of disclosure observes a different temporality, as the menace that
threatens the young princes is met by this deferred and graduated response. This could be
seen as a secular equivalent to the traditional strategy used by artists depicting the Annuncia-
tion from the fifteenth century onwards, when the discrete and separate stages of the Virgin’s
response were individually represented.
Yet there is more circumstantial evidence to suggest that, in the Princes in the Tower, Dela-
roche’s use of the Annunciation as a model became integral to a degree never attempted
before. The Gothic lock, which (as has already been noted) is no less prominent as a source of
sinister light than the base of the door in the contemporary Schauer photograph (illus. 4.4), does
indeed reflect Delaroche’s familiarity with the world of Romantic antiquarianism. It may also
reflect an acquaintance with Robert Campin’s great Merode altarpiece of the early fifteenth
century, where a ‘half-open oaken door, with its rusting iron hinges, lock and intricately
wrought key” offer access for the Flemish donors to the mystery of the Annunciation. Delar-
oche’s well-attested interest in medieval illuminated manuscripts, of which several can be found
in the sale catalogue of 1857,°° has moreover ensured that, instead of the ‘book of prayers’ men-
tioned by Shakespeare and casually depicted by Northcote, the princes are holding a fully
fledged Book of Hours with a brilliant illumination visible on the upturned page. In the
various versions of Princes in the Tomer, this image is more or less distinct according to its size
and the technique employed. But all show a scene in which a red-robed figure on the left con-
fronts a figure robed in blue: no more than a hint perhaps, like the unfinished canvas in Filippo
Lippi, of what might be read as an Annunciation.”°
One final piece of evidence offers an insight into the careful sifting and combining of motifs,
informed by antiquarian knowledge, which was the prelude to composition for Delaroche.
Above the shoulder of the elder prince, hanging from the bedhead, is what appears to be a
golden medallion (and at the extreme right edge of the picture, cut off by the frame, is another
one, placed symmetrically opposite). Delaroche might well have come across this type of
medieval devotional object in his contacts with contemporary collectors.?’ He might not have
known, however, that their function was to serve as reliquary pendants. Although the 1830
version of Princes in the Tomer shows them simply as accessories, the notion that they might
have served as objects of worship is clearly indicated in the print of 1831 (illus. 42), where both
children are praying before a hanging object which glints in the light. Possibly Delaroche was
concerned at some point with giving this little object the kind of focal significance that the

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ANN UN GLATTONS. DEP OSITIONS. MARTYRDOM

47 Roger van der Weyden, Annunciation, oil on panel.

[ror |
 PAE DME META ROG

knightly star dangling from Henri IV’s neck acquires in Revoil’s composition. In any case, there
can be no doubt where the idea of hanging a medallion from the bedhead derived. A fine small
drawing shows him sedulously copying the structure and draperies of Mary’s four-poster bed
in Roger van der Weyden’s Annunciation, which entered the collection of the Louvre in 1799
(illus. 46-7). Van der Weyden’s golden pendant is picked out in particular detail in Delaroche’s
minutely attentive sketch.
Although I believe it to be no accident that Delaroche chose to incorporate this detail from a
celebrated Annunciation, | am, of course, trying to prove that his structural use of the Annun-
ciation contributes to the special novelty of his mode of historical representation. It 1s in Princes
in the Tower that we can see most clearly how that use could result, precisely, in the achievement
of what Roland Barthes called ‘the reality effect’. Barthes’s brief but influential essay actually
begins with two related examples, both of which seem relevant here. There is the description
of aroom in Flaubert’s Un Coeur simple, where we are told that ‘on an old piano, under a barom-
eter, there was a pyramid of boxes and cartons’. Then there is Michelet’s reference to the death
of Charlotte Corday, in which we are given an understated notice of the arrival of the execu-
tioner: ‘after an hour and a half, someone knocked softly at a little door behind her’.”” Barthes
is fascinated by the way 1n which ‘the real’ is signified by the ‘useless detail’ — precisely what does
not appear to be motivated by the requirements of the plot. But another way of accounting for
this new feature of the Romantic historiography, and the Realist literature, of the nineteenth
century is to say that the text is paying homage to the image: not just to any image, but to the
type of image that Delaroche had put on public display in the years around 1830. A painting
such as Princes in the Tower is, on one level, a composite of different objects capable of being
considered individually and related to specific historical criteria — a site of archaeological ex-
ploration. But it is also a space activated by a strong narrative, whose endless potential for
being rerun is signalled simply by the intrusive light that blazes from behind the closed door.
It is easy to imagine that Michelet, so alert to the visual world of Romanticism, might have
recalled to himself the anonymous arrival of the Princes’ executioners when he noted that
‘someone knocked softly at a little door’.?
This suggestion that Delaroche’s work was in accord with other advanced strategies of histor-
ical representation leads us to ask once again how it must have impinged on the historical con-
sciousness of his contemporaries, adept as they undoubtedly were in relating present to past
events. Just as his first Salon work, Joas, related to the arrival of the ‘enfant de miracle’, so De-
laroche’s Princes in the Tower could not fail to be interpreted in the light of contemporary devel-
opments. As has been noted, Delaborde acknowledged that it was finished long before the July
Revolution of 1830. But he admitted at the same time that it was treated as ‘an allusion to the
facts of contemporary history, a pious homage to the defeated, a lesson directed to the conquer-
ors’.”* Just how literally a reference to the fate of Edward V could be taken to apply to the child
heir of the Bourbon elder branch, displaced by the coup of Louis-Philippe, is attested by the
experience of the playwright Casimir Delavigne, Delaroche’s close friend and the author of a
play related to the painting shown in 1831, Les Enfants d’Edouard.?> When the premiere of this
work was announced for 18 May 1833, Thiers tried to ban it in the name of the government, and

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 AON UN GUAT TONS. DEP OST LLONS, MART
Y¥ RD OM

was outsmarted only by Delavigne’s bold move in bringing the issue to the attention of Louis-
Philippe himself. Louis-Philippe bridled at his minister’s suggestion that he could be obliquely
affected by the historical reference. ‘What resemblance is there between Gloucester and me?’ he
asked. ‘Have I ever tried to do away with the son of the Duchesse de Berry in order to assure
myself of the crown?’ Delavigne’s triumph over Thiers was complete when he was able to insin-
uate that it had indeed been Louis-Philippe himself who initially encouraged him to write a
modern play relating to this aspect of Shakespeare’s Richard III.°°
The tendency of contemporary critics to turn the Princes in the Tower, and indeed the
Crommell that appeared in the same Salon, into what Delaborde calls ‘moralities of circum-
stance’ was therefore inevitable, but hardly of great consequence. What is worthier of close at-
tention is the suggestion that the mode of viewing implied in Delaroche’s works invited a
particular kind of response from a clearly defined class or social group: in this case, the Princes
in the Tower represented not a veiled attack on the July Monarchy but, on the contrary, an appeal
to the great middle class, which was to be its favoured beneficiary. Dumas sketches out this idea,
in a passage that suggests that Northcote, rather than Delaroche, knew best how to make visual
art out of Shakespeare’s story:

If[Delaroche] paints the children of Edward, the moment he chooses is not the one when Richard IT1’s
executioners fall upon the poor innocents, and stifle their cries and their life beneath mattresses and
pillows. No, it is the one when the two children, seated on the bed which will become their tomb,
become disturbed and shiver, with a presentiment, at the sound of the steps of Death, which they do
not recognize yet, but which their dog has recognized, and which is approaching, hidden by the door of
the prison, but already infiltrates its pale and cadaverous light through cracks in the door.
It is evident that this is a side of art, a face of genius, which can be vigorously contested, but
conscientiously defended. This does not satisfy the artist very much, but it pleases the bourgeois
considerably.”

One could retort that Delaroche has not only the precedent of Racinian drama but also the
authority of Lessing’s Laocoon to justify the principle that horror should be manifested only
by displacement. But there is a further, more important issue of which Dumas’s criticism is
symptomatic, since what he qualifies as the ‘bourgeois’ sensibility can be correlated precisely
with what Prosper de Barante postulated as the new audience for historiography: those for
whom ‘there is nothing so impartial as the imagination’ since ‘it has no need to come to conclu-
sions’. What Dumas oddly (since the description he gives enters with gusto into the spirit of the
work) seems disposed to characterize as a timid censorship of violence could also be envisaged
as a wish to leave the imaginative options open — not only because the subject calls for it but
because it is in the nature of historical representation to preserve an open field for interpreta-
tion, once the intrusive moralism of eighteenth-century historiography has been conclusively
dismissed.
In effect, if we pursue this angle further, we may wish to conclude that it was precisely the
doubt hanging over the case of the Princes in the Tower — not in Shakespeare’s partisan drama,
but in contemporary historical debate — that made it an appropriate subject for Delaroche.
From his English contacts, Delaroche would certainly have become aware that the issue of

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 P AUIS DUE yA Ri@ Galion:

Richard IIs guilt in the murder of his nephews was by no means foreclosed, and other expla-
nations for the event than that to which Shakespeare gave credence had surfaced in the eight-
eenth century. Admittedly, English historians of Delaroche’s own period, such as the Rev. John
Lingard who published his History of England in 1819, were inclined to dismiss the objections to
Shakespeare’s choice of historical source.” But Delaroche must have been aware, when he
made his enquiries in England in 1827, that not enough positive evidence existed to put the
issue beyond reasonable doubt. If we argue that he saw this situation less as a drawback than
as a challenge, we can also appreciate how doubly appropriate it may be that the murderers do
not appear in person in Delaroche’s Princes in the Tower. Even the apparent anachronisms of the
portcullis and the rose could be interpreted as favouring the hypothesis of a different time for
the murder, and hence a different executant — perhaps the originator of the dynasty favoured by
Shakespeare, King Henry VII.
Even in France the notion that the murder of the Princes was an unsolved mystery was later
publicly diffused. In the Magasin pittoresque of 1842, there is a long article under the title
‘Doubts about the Tragic Death of the Children of Edward’.”’ The effect is slightly compro-
mised, however, by the fact that the accompanying illustration is a Murder ofthe Children of
Edward by the German painter Hildebrandt, which is clearly based on Northcote’s scenario,
and which shows Dighton and Forrest acting on cue. A quarter-century later, John Cassell’s
Illustrated story of England appears to compromise between the images of Northcote and De-
laroche by showing the children’s bed removed to the right-hand side of the composition,
though the murderers are already in the room and their pensive hesitation cannot mask the
guilt of the two accredited assassins (a certainty the text unhesitatingly upholds). At the very
end of the century, however, Cassell’s History went into a new illustrated edition, and the
earlier print was replaced. Its substitute, ‘after the picture by Paul Delaroche’, opened the issue
for debate once again (illus. 48—9).'°°
Of course, the fact that Delaroche’s image in this particular case outlasted the more circum-
stantial and specific versions was not simply dependent on the way it continued to allow doubt
on an issue that has never ceased to generate controversy. On the contrary, it could be argued
that all of Delaroche’s historical representations incorporated subject-matter that was open to
the widest possible variety of interpretations, transcending the circumstances of any one nation
or any particular historical epoch. In this sense, the choice of the Princes in the Tower fulfilled
effectively the conditions to which all his mature historical paintings approximated. This does
not mean, however, that his works were any less securely rooted in the culture of his own period,
and in the spectacular broadening ofthe historical spectrum to which Romanticism in its many
forms had so massively contributed. If Delaroche typically concentrated on resurrecting events
whose meaning, or very existence, was far from clear from the point of view of historical science,
his justification was that just such events would compel attention as soon as they were rendered
in visual terms. I have argued elsewhere that it is impossible to understand the ‘historical-mind-
edness’ of the Romantic period without postulating the existence of a ‘desire for history’: this
being not by any means identical to the historian’s wish to get the record straight, or indeed
the political writer’s need to mobilize the symbols of the past for the needs of the present."

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AN NON G VAT LOIN Ss) DEPOSIT WONS.. MAR TYR DO M

¥f MAGASIN PITTORESQUE, 49

de l'école de Dusseldorf.)
(Meurtre des enfonts d’Edouard, tablean de M, Hildebrandt,

car ce n’est polot en présence des spectateurs que

Sélon la tradition commune, Richard IIL, apres js'¢tre A Tyrrel;
le grand tragique a fait étouffer les ‘deux enfants. De notre
é du tréne d’Angleterre, voulut se défaire du jeune
Seer V et de Ee frére Je duc d’York. Il envoya | temps, M, Casimir Delavigne , ordinairement plus timide

48 Ferdinand-Theodor Hildebrandt, Murder of the Children ofEdward, 1835,

engraving by Karl Girardet.

30 CASSELL'S ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF ENGLAND. [Ap. 1483,

The Murder of the Princes in the Tower

49 The Murder of the Princes in the Tower, engraving by F. Pearson

in Cassell’s Illustrated History of England.

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 PAUL DEAK
O Grit

Delaroche’s distinctiveness lies perhaps in his unique ability to separate out the scientific and
the propagandist motivations — as far as possible — in the interests of an open representation. It
hardly needs to be added that this option required historical connoisseurship, as an ancillary
skill, to a high degree, and that its political implications were no less serious for being deliber-
ately understated.
Was there any reason why the painter in particular should be qualified to respond to the
‘desire for history’, from within a visual culture that was being propelled by new technologies
into ever more dramatic feats of illusionism? This is a question that will be carefully considered
in the next chapter, when Delaroche’s links to other forms of representation will come under
scrutiny. For the moment, however, it is appropriate to make a hypothesis that turns the
question on its head. This is that Delaroche understood very well the precise contribution
that a painter could make at this stage in the development of a mass historical culture: indeed
that he tailored his work to this requirement. In 1855, the English Examiner of Plays, William
Bodham Donne, commented on the new demands of the nineteenth-century public: ‘the
visions which our ancestors saw with the mind’s eye, must be embodied for us in palpable
forms . . . all must be made palpable to sight, no less than to feeling’."°* For the English as
well as the French public, Delaroche’s historical paintings must have provided the archetypes
for this ‘palpability’, nourishing the art of theatre in general, in the same way as Princes in the
Tower fed into the particular work by Casimir Delavigne.'°
The contemporary critic who best appreciated this aspect of Delaroche’s achievement was
however neither French nor English. Perhaps because he speaks from a position outside either
culture, and because he has an exceptionally sophisticated sense of the links between visual and
verbal representation, the German poet Heinrich Heine analyzes with the greatest degree of
finesse and understanding the goals that Delaroche was attempting to achieve in the paintings
sent to the Salon of 1831. He is particularly illuminating in his discussion of Cromimell and
Charles I, the large work immediately following the Princes in the Tower, which (as Delaborde
reminds us) was sketched out just before the Revolution of July 1830. But before using Heine’s
commentary on Cromivell as a way of entering the discussion of this work, it is worth hearing
Delaroche’s own justification for his approach, which comes in a letter written to a close con-
fidant exactly twenty years after the 1831 Salon. Delaroche intends in this revealing account to
accentuate his own decision to depart from Davidian orthodoxy (‘we must cease to believe that
it is only with a Greek nose that we can arrive at beauty’). The tokens that he offers for achieving
‘the true poetry of our art’ are however less impressive than his mature recognition of the effect
his work has exercised on the general domain of historical representation:

For twenty years I have been seeking to prove it as well as I may, and if 1am only allowed thirty, I expect
to prove that Lam right. Formerly the lines of acomposition, the character ofits figures, all was con-
vention, and you would have been able to guess in advance a composition, its colour and its effect,
through reading the Salon catalogue. Today new ideas, based on the simple and the true, should
guide the artist who knows how great a demand exists for an art which has up to now been swaddled
in false rules, for the sake of those cold intellects who could only become something through transmis-
sion. At the time of my Cromiell, people reproached me for making it too true, and now this figure has

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become the type for anyone wishing to represent him, either in the theatre, or in sculpture, even in
England, where they are proud of this dig hypocrite. Despite anything people may say, I believe I am
right, not that I defend the result of my thinking, but my thinking itself.’°*

Delaroche’s comments are apt to seem paradoxical, if we take them out of their own historical
context. How can it be logical to dismiss the academic cult of ‘convention’, on the one hand, and
then assert that his own rendering of Cromwell has ‘become the type’? How can he dismiss
‘transmission’ of motifs, while celebrating the fact that his own figure has indeed been trans-
mitted into other visual genres? These questions have some force. But they are conclusive ob-
jections only if we reject the claim embodied in Delaroche’s concept of ‘true poetry’: that a
rhetorical creation can, under certain conditions, also be the expression of a truth. To hold to
these two categories simultaneously is indeed the hallmark of a new type of historical enter-
prise.
Heine was vividly aware of this when he defined Delaroche’s attitude as the ‘choir-leader’
(Chérfiihrer) of the new school of historical painting represented in the 1831 Salon. He expresses
the point in the deliberately provocative statement: “This painter has no great predilection for
the past in itself, but for its representation, for the illustration of its spirit, and for writing
history in colours’ (Dieser Maler hat keine Vorliebe ftir die Vergangenheit selbst, sondern fiir thre Dar-
stellung, fiirdieVeranschaulichung thres Geistes, ftir Geschichtsschreibung mit Fa rben).'°° No German
historian or historical theorist of the Romantic period would have admitted so blithely to the
distinction between loving ‘the past in itself’ and conveying its spirit in vivid, concrete terms
(a plausible gloss on Veranschaulichung). Indeed the rhetoric of Ranke’s celebrated Preface to
the History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, dated October 1824, is devoted specifically to con-
vincing us that literary art is not involved in showing us ‘how it actually happened’.'*” But Heine
has nonetheless borrowed the terms of his distinction from historiographical debate, if only to
mark his own divergence. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s definition of “The Historian’s Task’, dated
1821, insisted on the achievement of ‘simple representation’ as the historian’s highest aim.’
Heine is merely insisting that, for the historical painter, die einfache Darstellung (simple repre-
sentation) is a concept that can make sense only in relation to the painter’s specific mode of
representation: that is, and must be, colour.
For Heine, then, the artist’s responsibility to the conditions of his medium does not conflict
with the aim of historical concreteness. On the contrary, it is its necessary precondition. As he
wrote in 1828, with reference to literary art, ‘History. . . is not falsified by the poets. They faith-
fully convey its meaning even when they invent figures and incidents’.'°’ A substantial part of
his lengthy discussion of Delaroche’s Cromwell and Charles I (illus. 69) may indeed be seen as a
kind of secondary invention, wherein the poet retraces the constituent features of the painting,
supplementing the colour notations with subtle indications of atmosphere and mood:

In one ofthe twilight, sombre rooms of Whitehall, the coffin of the decapitated king stands on dark-red
velvet chairs, and before it a man who lifts the lid with a steady hand and quietly gazes on the corpse.
That man stands there all alone; his form is broad and sturdy, his attitude careless, his countenance
that of an honest farmer. His costume is that of acommon soldier, puritanically plain; a long hanging
waistcoat of dark-brown velvet, under it a jacket of yellow leather; jackboots, which rise so high that the

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black breeches are hardly visible; a soiled, yellow sword-belt, from which depends a sword with basket-
hilt. . . ; on the closely cropped hair a hat with rolled-up rim and a red feather; on the neck a small,
white, rolling collar, beneath which a little armour is visible; dirty, tawny gloves, and in the hand which
is by the sword hilt is a short walking-cane; the other holds the lifted lid of the coffin in which the king
lies,**°

As a characterization of the painting, Heine’s account perhaps underplays the element of

violence in Cromwell’s stance. The black pall has been rudely pulled away to disengage the
coffin lid, and Cromwell’s left foot rests upon its edge, as if he could not wait to see the face of
his decapitated opponent. But Heine is right to insist, as he proceeds with his description, on
the curious reversal of degrees of importance that is carried over into the experience of viewing
the painting. As he remarks, ‘sentinels present arms out of respect to the higher rank of death
when a corpse is carried by’ and accordingly ‘Oliver Cromwell appears unfavourably as regards
the dead king’.'"' In visual terms, this reversal of hierarchies, in which the dead are ranked
‘higher’ than the living, corresponds to the different levels of fascination exerted by the figure
of Cromwell who is the internal witness initially mediating our perceptions, and the king, or
rather the king’s head ‘transfigured and refined from the martyrdom which he has endured,
hallowed by the majesty of misfortune, the precious purple circlet on his neck, the kiss of Mel-
pomene on his white lips . . ”''* Where Heine sees the king being kissed poetically by the tragic
Muse, we may well see in the averted face with its tuft of beard Delaroche’s most extreme use of
the ‘tipped’ face, which entraps the gaze.
Scraps of information exist that suggest that Delaroche prepared the composition of
Cromwell with the fastidious attention to preliminary muse-en-scene for which he would later
become notorious. Evidently he constructed a model, aided on this occasion not by English fur-
niture designers but by the set designers of the Paris Opera; his preoccupation with the image of
the severed head was signalled by the production of a tiny mode/lo, which was later cast in
bronze.''’ Correspondence with the Pastoret family indicates that he borrowed a portrait of
Cromwell from them, as he laboured to arrive at the ‘type’ for the great man."'+ In contrast
with his earlier works, for which few preliminary drawings for details of the composition
survive, we have an exceptionally fine study for the attentive face of Cromwell, which closely
parallels the finished painting (illus. 50). The fact that this drawing bears a dedication ‘a son
ami H. de Viel-Castel’, in addition to its date and signature, calls for some further comment.
Horace de Viel-Castel was an aristocratic adherent of the deposed Bourbon dynasty. Then at
the outset of his critical career, he wrote a politically slanted article on Cromiell in the influen-
tial journal L4rtiste (see p. 114). He was also, however, longlived enough to see and respond to
the arrival of Modernist painting, with its associated critical problems, in the 1860s. Michael
Fried has singled out for special attention his comments on Whistler’s Zhe Woman in White,
which provoked a flood of speculation when it was presented at the Salon of 1863. Viel-Castel
was not unusual in pointing out the trance-like state of Whistler’s figure, which he compared to
that of the sleep-walking Lady Macbeth. But he was original in singling out for attention an
alternative feature of the work, the head of the animal on whose furry pelt the woman stands:
this is ‘stuffed and furnished with enamel eyes [and] thrusts menacingly toward the beholder’.d1I5

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 ANN UNGLAT IONS. DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

50 Study for Cromwell, c. 1830, drawing.

Fried takes this commentary to mean that Viel-Castel found in Whistler’s canvas ‘both an ab-
sorptive, beholder-denying structure (keyed to the woman’s state of mind) and a facing,
beholder-aggressing one (based on the orientation of the animal pelt). For him, moreover,
this response, taken in conjunction with other similar responses to paintings of that period,
proves that ‘there existed in the first half of the 1860s a highly structured discursive field
oriented to the issues of absorption and beholding’."”° We must take into account, however,
that Fried’s analysis of ‘the issues of absorption and beholding’ begins in the later eighteenth
century, with Diderot’s exposure of the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion in the genre and
history paintings of his day. It therefore presupposes a continuous structural transformation
of the language of painting taking place over the century that divides Diderot and the Moder-
nists, of which Gericault’s Rafi of theMedusa is one salient example.''” The significance of De-
laroche’s Crommell in this process should not be underestimated, since it sets up similar
conditions for inclusion, by way of the regicide’s gaze, and for abrupt expulsion. Even if Viel-
Castel did not, in 1831, formulate his reaction in these terms, he may later have sensed, in the
bear’s staring head, the lingering menace of the king’s tufted, dislocated face.
This innocent hypothesis, hinging on the critical career of Viel-Castel, does of course
conceal a more substantial wager on the significance of Delaroche’s work, when seen against a
broader perspective than that of Romantic painting ‘out court. The strength of the opposition to
Delaroche’s painting, as it has already been recalled here, can be summed up in terms of the
well-known thesis of Baudelaire: that there is but one contemporary painter who is capable of
continuing and expanding the tradition of the Old Masters, and he is Eugene Delacroix. There
is NO room, in consequence, for a painter whose facture and temperament are wholly antitheti-
cal to those of Delacroix — whose academic success and social connections, moreover, place him

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 PAUL D EGA OIGhHink

51 Takers ofthe Bastille before the Hotel de Ville, 1839, oil on canvas.

in a position too prominent to be ignored. Yet, as David Carrier has pointed out, this position
on Delacroix does not really square (and should not be made to square) with Baudelaire’s other
major thesis: that there is a ‘painting of modern life’, of which the identifying mark is 1ts respon-
siveness to the myriad sensory pleasures of the contemporary city.""® In order to validate the
second position, Baudelaire was obliged to downgrade the evidence for the persistence of a
Rococo tradition in painters such as Schall, and indeed in Delaroche’s friend Eugene Lami,
whom he slightingly dismissed as ‘the poet of official dandyism’.""? In order to sustain the
first, he was obliged to castigate what he deemed to be pretenders to the great tradition —
Horace Vernet and Delaroche, for example, whose ‘vast pictures’ lay around in the studio,
with some parts finished and others left blank, as if painting were ‘a purely manual exercise in
covering a certain quantity of space in a determinate time’.'~°
Baudelaire’s strategy is coherent and easy to grasp. But the terms of his condemnation
suddenly come to seem less relevant if it is accepted that compositional principles such as the
‘pose’, and spectatorial relations of inclusion and exclusion, are the markers for a continuing
commitment to the advancement of visual art over the period separating Diderot and the Mod-
ernists — a commitment, moreover, that transcends the contemporary distinction between the
‘born painter’ and his less spectacularly gifted counterpart. Delaroche probably would not have

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rejected the imputation that his working procedures were laborious in the extreme. In a letter to
Henri Delaborde dated 25 April 1832, he referred to working on one of his paintings, possibly
the Takers of the Bastille (illus. 51), ‘like a mason’.'*' Even if this large composition, which took
nine years to complete, is an uncharacteristic example, there can be no satisfactory rebuttal to
the accusation that Delaroche’s paintings testified, in their minuteness of finish, to the sedulous
care with which he had prepared the archaeological ground. But this stigma hardly affects the
more substantial claims that can be made for the importance of his work, whether in terms of
his own intentions or in terms of the historic estimate that a method such as that of Michael
Fried brings into view. His claim to have created the ‘type’ for Cromwell was initially depen-
dent on the success of the large painting sent to the Salon of 1831, but by definition not limited
by its inaccessibility when it began its long period of residence at Nimes in 1834. Even though
this was one of the few significant works that failed to appear at the retrospective exhibition of
1857, it had been perpetuated as an image by the striking maniere noire engraving by the young
Henriquel-Dupont, which was acclaimed at the Salon of 1833 (illus. 69).'** This must have
given it the prominence, in the form of a reproduction, that inspired the English cartoonist in
1851 to create his Travesty ofDe La Roche's Celebrated Picture (illus. 3).
In terms of Fried’s criteria, there can be no doubt that the size and quality of the original
painting were integral to Delaroche’s success. What Heine called its ‘incomparable superiority,
combining the refinement of Van Dyck with the bold shadowing of Rembrandt’,’* enabled the
stocky figure of Cromwell to loom out of the rich and sombre background, establishing a
variable focus between advancing and receding planes. But Henriquel-Dupont’s prints after
Cromwell demonstrate fully the point that in this period printmaking was rightly regarded not
as a mere reproduction but as a form of translation from one medium to another, which

52 Cromwell and Charles I, engraving by Louis-Pierre Henriquel-Dupont, 1833.

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 PAUL DEDA RO Gril

involved creative decisions on the appropriate new effects to be achieved.'* If the critic Auguste
Jal slightly surprisingly praised Henriquel-Dupont’s first print as a ‘piece full of force and
colour’,’*> he was surely reacting to the clever transposition whereby the engraver has substi-
tuted the transparent ground of aquatint for the rich tonalities of Delaroche’s painting, giving
the figure of Cromwell an equivalent plastic prominence. When Henriquel-Dupont went on to
produce a small etching for wider circulation, he audaciously suppressed the background alto-
gether, allowing only the white page to set off the intense encounter of Cromwell and the King
(illus. 53). In both of these transpositions, however, Henriquel-Dupont has worked hard to
enhance in his own terms precisely the qualities that initiate the viewer into the dialectic of ab-
sorption and theatricality. What the print inevitably loses in the matter of direct bodily address
— the figures no longer conforming with correct human proportions or size — 1t no doubt makes
up for to some extent by its infinitely wider diffusion as a multiplied image and what might be
called its mnemonic force.
It is worth noting that for Delacroix, as well as for Baudelaire commenting on Delacroix’s
work, the success of a visual image depended on quite different criteria. Indeed, Delacroix dis-
agreed so violently with the approach represented by Cromimel/ that he painted a watercolour to
convey his own preference, as well as making his criteria clear 1n a letter to his friend the painter
Paul Huet (illus. 54). Delacroix’s verbal observations are interesting, if open to objections. He
prefers to imagine a Cromwell who hovers self-consciously on the margins of the scene. ‘He
hesitates, worries, involuntarily takes off his hat and, fascinated by the spectacle of the denoue-
ment of this drama which he has lived through doesn’t know whether to go forward or
backward?’”° But when this first cousin to Hamlet is brought to life by Delacroix’s watercolour,
the drawbacks — or at least the deep differences — vis-a-vis Delaroche’s conception are only too
plain. Delacroix’s work recalls the watercolours of his friend Bonington — even to the theatrical
curtain the tassels of which hang inexplicably above the King’s head. ‘Drama’ is created by the
bravura manipulation of tonal nuance, with a zone of high light almost dematerializing the
threatened head. Impatient with the sleight of hand of Delaroche, who has tapered off the fore-
shortened coffin into impalpable space, Delacroix has dumped it down parallel to the picture
plane, with the effect that Cromwell has to stare from a distance. Across this distended space,
there is no possibility of the intense regard of Delaroche’s Cromimell, who has not even bothered
to remove his hat in his haste to raise the coffin lid, and 1s stopped short in his thoughts by the
spectacle of what is no less — and perhaps no more — than a severed head.
Cromivell was a work on which contemporary critics were sharply divided, and even those
most favourable to Delaroche found aspects of it disquieting. Delaborde hinted delicately in
his retrospective essay, “The severed head of Charles I, the straw which will drink the blood of
Jane Grey perhaps go past the limit of useful truths’.'*7 But from our own point of view, it is
surely no more satisfactory to dismiss Crommell by endorsing Delacroix’s strictures than to
relegate Jane Grey (the work to which we shall turn next) as a piece of Grand Guignol. What
Delaborde detects as ‘past the limit’ is a wrenching of pictorial mechanisms entirely consistent
with Delaroche’s position between (let us say) Géricault and Couture.'”> At the same time, the
specifically historical resonance of Cromuivell, far from being inhibited by the inclusion of so

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GLA EL YOINS., DEP OSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

22
walios) 310}

54 Eugene Delacroix, Crommell before the Coffin of Charles 1, 1831, W atercolour,

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 PAU LD EA ROG Ek

extreme a pictorial device as the severed head, must have been amplified by the reference to
horrors not far from the level of popular consciousness in post-revolutionary France. The
fathers both of Louis-Philippe — who came to the throne while Delaroche was working on
Cromwell — and his minister Guizot — who was very probably responsible for the dispatch of
the painting on a permanent basis to his home town, Nimes, the site of exceptional slaughter
during the Revolution — had both perished on the guillotine. Indeed Guizot had thought fit to
include an even more ghoulish variant of the same incident in a book specifically intended to
inform the future citizens of France about a history so closely parallel to their own. In his
History ofEngland Told to my Grandchildren, he noted of the aftermath to Charles Ps execution:

The coffin remained for seven days on show at Whitehall; Cromwell had it opened, and taking in his
hands the head, as if to assure himself that it was indeed separate from the trunk: ‘He was a strongly
built man, he said, ‘who might have lived a long time.’'*?

Delaroche settled for a more general reference, from contemporary historiography, in his brief
annotation to the Salon catalogue. He quotes from the work of the Romantic poet and Restora-
tion statesman Chateaubriand whose Les Quatre Stuart of 1828 has Cromwell simply ‘lifting the
cover of the coffin to contemplate the remains of this prince’."*° But to speak of a specific
‘source’ for the painting 1s irrelevant, beside the fact that its theme chimed in exactly with the
widespread tendency before and after 1830 to use the great events of the completed English Re-
volution as a series of parallels, and warnings, in the interpretation of the course of a French
Revolution, which appeared to be far from complete. This said, the choice of Cromwell as his
subject allowed Delaroche to stimulate reactions that went far beyond the obvious parallelisms
trotted out by the critics. Viel-Castel might comment, ‘We too have had our Charles I, our
square in Whitehall and our Cromwell, believing that he was obliged to seal his revolutionary
pact with all the blood of a royal person,’ But Heine was keen to eliminate any trace of royalist
nostalgia from what he believed to be the ‘more democratic’ interpretation of Cromwell’s visit
followed by Delaroche. He wrote:

In the face of this Cromwell there is not the least expression of astonishment, wonder, or any other
storm of the soul; on the contrary, the beholder is shocked by this frightful, horrible calmness in the
man’s countenance. There he stands, a form as firm as earth, ‘brutal as fact’, powerful without pathos,
naturally supernatural [ddmonisch natiirlich|, marvellously commonplace, outlawed and yet famous,
beholding his work almost like a woodman who has just felled an oak.'*”

Heine is probably right in implying that Delaroche is not interested in painting the ‘human’
Cromwell, compounded of contrasts and conflicts, who appears in the influential literary
works of the previous decade: Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock (1826) and Victor Hugo’s pioneering
Romantic drama, Cromimell (1828). His concern is with what makes the great historical actor
almost a form of nature — in Heine’s fine phrase, an erdsichere Gestalt (literally, a form as firm
as earth) — while recalling in his very insensibility the effects of his handiwork on mankind.
Cromwell is thus the prototype of the successive portrayals of Napoleon, which recur right up
to the end of Delaroche’s career. But whatever Cromwell may feel about Charles I, the spectator

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also, inveigled by the mechanisms ofthe painting, is obliged to take a view of the martyred king:
of a body being evacuated, like Elizabeth’s, before our eyes.

What I hope at least to have done so far in this progressive analysis of Delaroche’s major Salon
painting is to demonstrate the complexity of his artistic engagement, on more than one level. It
hardly makes sense to consider his development of historical genre outside the specific intellec-
tual and cultural conditions through which historical discourse was being reformulated during
the Romantic period. Only by a narrow and biased definition of the province ofart history could
this development be portrayed simply in terms of the decline of traditional history painting.
Equally, it is a misunderstanding of Delaroche’s working processes to imagine that he simply
seized opportunistically on a series of unrelated, tear-jerking themes. Superficial accounts of
the way in which he supposedly plagiarized English sources have tended to monopolize atten-
tion, from his own time onwards, while the really interesting issue 1s the particular view of
artistic tradition (and its interruption) that conditioned his highly allusive, but thoroughly as-
similated, pictorial language. Only the immense and continuing prestige of the school ofDavid,
now more than ever invested with the glow of nostalgia, could have succeeded in deflecting all
serious attention from this representative of a generation that was barred from the alluring
ephebic struggles of its predecessor.
However, as the two paintings recently discussed were conceived at the end of the Restora-
tion and first exhibited under the July Monarchy, it is appropriate to mention briefly — before
passing to the works situated firmly within the new reign — the concept that has undoubtedly
engendered most confusion in the contextual understanding of Delaroche’s career. This is the
notion of the juste-mulieu, or golden mean, whose application to the work of Delaroche and some
of his contemporaries has acquired all the banal rigidity of a Flaubertian idee regue. As Norman
Ziff has carefully explained, the term was first used in a critical context with reference to the
1831 Salon, but in labelling certain honest but mediocre artists in this way the critic in
question certainly did not have Delaroche in mind.'°? If juste-milieu later came to acquire the
sense it has retained up to the present day, designating in particular Delaroche, Horace Vernet
and Ary Scheffer, this is because of a conflation with the more general use of the term to refer to
the conciliatory political mission of Louis-Philippe. The three artists could be dismissed as
safe, boring and bourgeois in the same measure as the Citizen King, and by implication asso-
ciated with the repressive and censorious measures that his government felt itself obliged to
take.
As Zerner and Rosen emphasize, it was Léon Rosenthal who gave this amplified concept of
juste-milieu its modern currency, maintaining moreover that an infallible test for a juste-milieu
art was (and is) its ‘immediate intelligibility’.*+ Its use has never been more broadly and revea-
lingly demonstrated than in a recent, ambitious social history of nineteenth-century art where
the section on ‘The July Monarchy and the Art of Juste Miliew serves as a dumping ground fora
range of heterogeneous (but equally despised) materials.'*° Delaroche’s Hemucycle at the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts is dismissed as ‘the Classical tradition compromised by bourgeois historicism’,

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and the genre historique is illustrated (oddly enough) by two works from the very end of the
period: Scheffer’s St Augustine and St Monica, and the Cockfight (1846) by Delaroche’s pupil
Jean-Léon Gérome, who had barely begun his long career at the time. “The political impetus
behind such works, we are told, ‘is of course profoundly conservative.3°
This is not the place to argue for a different view of the complex intellectual, cultural and
social history of post-revolutionary France, which is in any event already piercing through
where the historical approach is not so determinedly Whiggish. McWilliam’s admirably
nuanced study ofthe social art theories of the French Left makes it quite clear why the religious
work of Ary Scheffer — an early contact of Saint-Simon and secretary of the French Carbonari
under the Republican general La Fayette — was extolled for its universal liberating message by
the left-wing critic Louis Piel in 1837, in the same way as his colleague Philippe Buchez had
responded favourably to the ‘intelligibility’ of Lady Jane Grey.'5’ It is of course true that the
volatile political culture of the Restoration period had, by the time of the July Monarchy,
resolved into a state more closely approaching polarization between a bourgeois party of goy-
ernment and a radical opposition. Yet this contrast is complicated by the fact that most of the
stalwarts of the new order were drawn from the radicals of the previous regime. Adolphe
Thiers, art critic at the time of the 1824 Salon and founder in 1830 with Armand Carrel of the
oppositional journal Le National, was by 1833 the minister charged with the possible censorship
of Delavigne’s Les Enfants d’Edouard. Carrel maintained Le National’s oppositional stance,
aided by Ary Scheffer’s brother, Arnold. It would be unrewarding to pursue the debate as to
whether, when Ary Scheffer painted Carrel on his death-bed in 1836, the ‘political impetus’
behind such a work was not in some way ‘profoundly conservative’."*
The reasons for assimilating Delaroche’s work to the style and the political stance loosely
described as juste-milieu are convincing only up to a point. Reference has already been made
to Baudelaire’s observation that he found, in both Delaroche’s and Vernet’s studios, large un-
finished canvases waiting to be filled in. Although he may well have glimpsed the early stages of
some ofVernet’s large, bravura compositions for the Galerie des Batailles at Versailles, he would
have been unlikely to see in Delaroche’s studio anything on such a scale except the one or two
major public commissions that he neglected notoriously, and delayed finishing for years, while
attending to more modest achievements.'*” Delaroche, unlike Vernet and Scheffer, was not a
contributor to the Galerie des Batailles. Another of Baudelaire’s judgements, which might
favour the supposition that Delaroche was allied stylistically with a fellow juste-milieu painter,
was his wickedly acute remark that Ary Scheffer’s paintings produced the same effect as those of
Delaroche ‘washed by heavy rain’."*° This certainly says something about the well-known lim-
itations of Scheffer’s technique, but there is no reason to convict Delaroche of guilt by associa-
tone4
In effect, there is no good reason for not treating Delaroche as an individual artist, for whom
the general label of juste-nuliew has very little significance. This applies also to the degree of
‘Orleanism’ manifested by the trio. There can be no doubt at all that Ary Scheffer’s links with
the Orleans family were deep and long-standing. Drawing master to the children of the then
Duc @Orleans from 1822 onwards, Scheffer acted as a personal informant to the Duke during

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 ANNUNCTIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

the Revolution of July 1830, and remained faithful to the family even after the subsequent revo-
lution of 1848, helping them when they were forced to depart Paris.'** Equally, the connection
of Horace Vernet to the Orleans family was very close, being based on the long-standing friend-
ship of his father Carle; it was affirmed in 1822 with the painting for the future Louis-Philippe
of four famous battle scenes from the revolutionary years (now in the National Gallery,
London), and reaffirmed after 1830 when he was asked to record a decisive moment in the
closing stages of the conflict: The Duc d’Orléans Leaves the Palais-Royal to Present Himself at the
Hotel de Ville, 31 July 1530 (Musée de Versailles)."*8 Delaroche was not nearly so well favoured
by the Orléans connection. That is to say, he received the patronage of the Duchesse d’Orléans,
who commissioned a design for a stained-glass window at the family home of the Chateau @Eu,
in Normandy (the composition of this work will be discussed in the next chapter); he was also
on good terms with the eldest son and heir to Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans in his turn, who
commissioned the oil painting of the Assassination of the Duc de Guise for the Chateau de Chan-
tilly; a record indeed exists of a small portrait of Louis-Philippe himself, dated 1829, which has
now disappeared from view.'** But he seems to have had little connection with — and little
response from — the King himself, even when, in 1835, he became the son-in-law of Horace
Vernet. Indeed, the story recounted by Mirecourt that Louis-Philippe created ill-feeling by
pointedly refusing to receive Delaroche’s wife at court probably conceals an earlier estrange-
ment.'* Louis-Philippe, who appears to have had a bluntly instrumental view of art, could
not perhaps dismiss the thought that the two large paintings shown to such acclaim by Dela-
roche at the Salon of 1831 were linked by the theme of usurpation.
The one political cause that Delaroche undoubtedly shared with Vernet and Scheffer — and
in which he took a prominent and positive role — was the politics of art. Here it is necessary to
point out that the composition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the early years of the July
Monarchy still reflected the prominence in earlier years of the school of David, which was re-
presented not simply by Neo-classical painters, but also by Neo-classical architects. The
number of painters included in the Academy had been raised from twelve to fourteen at the
outset of the Restoration, the Neo-classicist Charles Meynier receiving the thirteenth place
and Carle Vernet the fourteenth. By 1832, its membership comprised artists such as Gros,
Granet, Ingres and Horace Vernet, though the latter was mainly absent from Paris in the pursu-
ance of his duties as Director of the French Academy at Rome. It 1s certainly a testimony to the
new forces working in the painting section that, on Meynier’s death in 1832, the young Dela-
roche was chosen to replace him, in preference to classically trained candidates such as
Francois-Edouard Picot, who had studied in Italy with a Grand Prix de Rome at the end of
the Empire, and maintained a flourishing studio during the Restoration. But it is equally a
measure of the close balance of interests represented in the Academy that Delaroche was
elected only after the fourth ballot.'*°
After achieving such immense success at the Salon of 1831, the newly elected Academician
entered no works for the Salon that opened in March 1833. The Assassination of the Duc de Guise
and Jane Grey were undoubtedly under way by this stage, not to mention the large 7akers of the
Bastille (illus. 51), though the need to nurse his brother Jules through the serious cholera

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 PAUL DETAR OIG

epidemic of 1832 had slackened the pace of his work.'*” Delaroche’s attendance at the weekly
sessions of the Académie des Beaux-Arts was, however, regular from the end of 1832 onwards,
and on 14 December 1833 he took the lead in a proposal for the reform of the Salon, speaking on
behalfof his colleagues in the Painting section. He returned to the charge on 11 January, this
time giving his views specifically on the need to alter the jury system, which determined the
selection or rejection of works. By this stage, preparations for the selection of the 1834 Salon
would have been well under way, and an academician in the architecture section, Auguste-
Jean-Marie Guénepin, succeeded in deferring all talk of reform until the Salon of the succeed-
ing year. Delaroche publicly advertised his disgust with this temporizing measure by failing to
attend the sessions of the Academy until the end of March, when the Salon including Jane Grey
had opened."
This was by no means the end of Delaroche’s campaign to liberalize the selection of works for
the Salon, which did indeed appear to depend principally on his personal energy and initiative.
In the second half of 1834, he was in Italy, and no further action was taken in the Painting
section. But on 30 January 1836, when the next in what had become a yearly pattern of Salons
was imminent, he brought a further motion forward ‘particularly on the system of exhibition of
works at the Salon du Louvre’.'*? On 3 February, there was an extraordinary meeting to discuss
his proposal, which continued until the evening only to resume on 6 February and then again
on 13 and 20 February. It was not until the last occasion that Delaroche’s initiative was finally
superseded by an alternative motion proposed by the architect Jean-Nicholas Huyot, which
enjoined each of the five sections of the Academy to make its own recommendations ‘for the
perfecting of the different parts of the Fine Arts’."°° Delaroche and Horace Vernet thereupon
resigned from the Salon jury."
This significant entry of Delaroche into public life during the early years of the July
Monarchy is worthy of attention, not only because it throws new light on his decision to
abandon the Salon for good after 1837, but also because it indicates what, in pragmatic terms,
was the common cause throughout these years of the much-derided juste-milieu painters. The
jury system, which controlled access to the Salon, enabled the architects to flout the views of the
majority of the Painting section, and prohibit entry to young artists who offended against the
Neo-classicist orthodoxy (Huyot, Delaroche’s adversary, was a former student of David and
habitue of the school of Rome, whose architectural projects were never built but who was
known to have a ‘passion for the antique’’>’) . Although Horace Vernet must have supported
the dogged struggle of the youngest member of the Academy — by the end of the period, his
own son-in-law — to break this stranglehold, it was undoubtedly Delaroche who sustained and
prolonged the procedural battle over more than two years. Ary Scheffer was not an Academi-
cian (and indeed he took French nationality only in 1850), but he showed his solidarity with
Delaroche and Vernet by exhibiting in his studio in Nouvelle Athénes paintings that had been
refused by the jury of the 1836 Salon. These included landscape works by Paul Huet (Dela-
croix’s friend and the correspondent to whom he had communicated his disappointment with
Delaroche’s Crommell) and the more celebrated landscape painter Théodore Rousseau, whose
works were to be excluded from the Salon for the entire period of the July Monarchy.'*?

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 ANN UNGIATLONS. DEPOSTLIONS, MARTYRDOM

There can be no doubt that the appearance of Jane Grey at the 1834 Salon needs to be seen in
this context, rather than in relation to the pernicious myth of the conservative juste-milieu. Cer-
tainly this painting was the work ofa young artist who had achieved national recognition, lucra-
tive commissions and a large measure of critical success to compensate for the dissenting voices.
But it was also a work that emerged from Delaroche’s individual sense of mission, far transcend-
ing the political manoeuvres and compromises that became the hallmark of bourgeois
hegemony during the July Monarchy. The exceptional popularity (even for Delaroche) of Jane
Grey testified eloquently to his determination to advertise publicly the appeal of the new
emotions and new sensations, which historical genre could add to the exhausted repertoire of
Davidian history painting."*+ Yet paradoxically, Jane Grey is also Delaroche’s most Davidian
work. It is the work that shows most conclusively how Delaroche’s engagement, on a critical
level, with the compositional procedures of earlier artists brings into play the repetition-struc-
ture of post-Renaissance Western painting.

Jane Grey, or the Execution of Lady Jane Grey (illus. 75), as it is labelled by the National Gallery
of London, is in most respects the work from Delaroche’s period of exhibition at the Salons
whose genesis is most easy to trace. There is a highly finished watercolour, signed and dated
1832, which shows the main elements of the composition in place, though the architectural
background is less elaborate and the figure of the executioner, 1n particular, was later revised
completely (illus. 76). There are two large sheets of drawings for different individual aspects of
the composition, of which one at least (and possibly both) seems to postdate the 1832 water-
colour, since the executioner bears an axe as in the finished work, rather than a broadsword
(illus. 55—6). There is also a drawing of the central group of the composition, involving the
victim and the Lieutenant of the Tower, which certain features, such as the sleeves ofJane
Grey’s dress, would also tend to place between the watercolour and the final state of the work
(illus. 57). This sequence of preparatory materials demonstrates the exceptionally wide range of
variation between possible poses, at least for the major figures, which Delaroche essayed while
keeping the overall composition in mind. It also suggests that, if he did indeed repeat his
previous practice of working from model figures, there was a further, more significant stage,
which involved studio poses from the life.
Given that this was the work of which Delaroche was accused of ‘stealing’ the subject from
the English, this preparatory material is also useful in demonstrating how minimally the
specific precedent influenced the main decisions that he was obliged to take. John Opie’s
Mary Queen of Scots, engraved by Skelton for Bowyer’s edition of Hume’s History ofEngland,
was a much less compelling image than Smirke’s Queen Elizabeth Appointing her Successor in
the same collection (illus. 58). Although the figure of the executioner is striking in itself, and
may possibly have been the source for the standing figure in the rapid sketch that occupies the
centre of one of the large sheets of drawings (illus. 56), the mild and shrinking Mary Queen of
Scots is neither expressive enough nor compositionally assured enough to bear much compar-
ison with Delaroche’s Jane. Indeed Delaroche’s own vignette of Mary Queen of Scots Disnussing

[119 |
 PAUL DELTA
RO Girk

55 Sheet of studies for the Execution of Lady Jane Grey (with variants for figure of executioner),
before 1834, drawing.
4 omen | <a > san - —

56 Sheet of studies for the Execution of Lady Jane Grey, before 1834, drawing.

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 ANN UIN'G LAT COINS. DEPOSITIONS., MARTYRDOM

58 John Opie, The Execution of the Queen of Scots, engray ing by William Skelton, 1795.

[ 121 |
 PAUL DE LA ROG BE

59 Mary Queen ofScots Dismissing Melville, lithograph by Eugene Lami, in Amedee Pichot,
Vues pittoresques de l’Ecosse, Paris, 1826.

Melville, published in the Vues pittoresques de l’Ecosse in 1826, is a more convincing precedent for
the way in which attention is focused on the intense experience of the central subject (illus.
59).°°?Delaroche may recall Opie when he shows one of the grieving ladies-in-waiting with
her back turned, but again his vignette is more explicit in the way the subsidiary actors mirror
the victim’s distress.
What the sequence of drawings up to the final composition of Jane Grey does show very
clearly is the preoccupation of Delaroche with two crucial aspects of the work: the representa-
tion of the hesitant movement with which the victim approaches the block, steadied by the
Lieutenant’s guiding hand, and the attitude taken during this tentative process by the future
executioner. The first feature was undoubtedly Delaroche’s response to the historical source
that he featured in the Salon catalogue, where Jane is reported as ‘crying piteously, “What
shall I do now? Where is the block?””>” The gloss is preserved in a written caption (though in
a variant version) for a reproduction of Jane Grey, which appears in an English history book at
the turn of the twentieth century, so persistent was the identification of the image with this
particular description of the scene (illus. 60). Delaroche had to take special care in conveying
the effect of a staccato, interrupted forward movement. It is possible that he used as a model
for this important feature the noted actress and sociétaire of the Comedie Francaise, Mademoi-
selle Anais, who played the part of Richard, Duke of York, in the first performance of Dela-
vigne’s Les Enfants d’Edouard in 1833, and was noted for her blonde hair and her slight,
delicate figure.'°” And if Anais was a model for Jane, she may also be the subject of one of De-
laroche’s most engaging studies, probably from this period, which shows a young woman ten-
tatively calculating her forward motion, ina fashion comparable to the rapid sketch on the right
of the central compositional study referred to previously (illus. 61).
AGNON UNG LAT LTOINS, DEPOSIT TONS. MOAR
T Y FDO M

60 Execution of Lady Fane Grey, photographic reproduction signed ‘Grout’,

from a textbook of English history, c. rgoo.
 PAUL DEDA
RO Chik

Yet it is in respect of the second feature that Delaroche shows the full measure both of his
divergence from Opie, and the distinctive character of his work. Opie’s executioner is an
awesome representative of the monarch’s power of punishment: Mary Queen of Scots was, of
course, executed for plotting with the enemies of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. He is in full
armour — an archaeological touch of incongruous precision — and appears to have lent his
helmet to the anonymous figure employed in adjusting the blindfold. Delaroche’s executioner
goes through a whole series of carefully developed variations — from the watercolour of 1832
through the two large sheets of drawings — in order that his role as an embodiment of violence
may be conciliated with his human concern for the victim. In the watercolour he seems perhaps
too deeply involved, as his gaze is read from his clearly visible profile. The way in which he holds
his great sword, moreover, is quite unconvincingly defined.'® In the second large sheet of
drawings, we see a range of poses, which seek to combine practical access to the axe with an
oblique glance testifying to his deeper engagement (illus. 56). The final version in the oil
painting is a finely judged compromise between the athletic disengagement suggested by
some of the smaller sketches, and a sufficiently detectable involvement manifested in the half-
turned face (illus. 75).
Balzac, attentive as ever to the images that jostled for expression in the minds of his contem-
poraries, wrote in La Peau de chagrin (1831): ‘Have the executioners not sometimes wept over
the virgins whose blonde heads had to be cut off at a signal from the Revolution?’*’ There
can be no doubt that Delaroche was thinking in terms of an analogy with this notion. Heine
mentions in his review of the 1831 Salon that the painter of Cromuivell was already involved in a
‘companion-piece. . .a Napoleon on St Helena’: ‘he has chosen the moment when Sir Hudson
Lowe is lifting the lid from the corpse of that great representative of Democracy’.'°° Nothing
more is known about Delaroche’s involvement, at this stage, with the Napoleonic legend, which
he was to invoke repeatedly from 1837 onwards. But the trace of Jane Grey’s parallel with the
revolutionary years can be detected in the more finished sketch towards the top of the second
sheet of drawings, which is clearly labelled La Dauphine et L[ouis] 17 au temple (illus. 56). As far
as can be determined, Delaroche made nothing more of this rather unpromising scene, which
combined the young boy posthumously credited with his dead father’s title (like the elder
Prince in the Tower) with the sister who managed to escape the guillotine, the future
Duchesse d’Angouléme."*' Such a juxtaposition emphasizes the marked selectivity of Delaro-
che’s historical themes. Like Louis XVII (and like Edward V of England), Lady Jane Grey was
an innocent victim, a Queen for a few days who died as a result of political circumstances not of
her own making. That was what qualified her for Delaroche’s purposes, and what would have
undoubtedly disqualified the more worldly and compromised Mary Queen of Scots.
I said earlier that Jane Grey was Delaroche’s most Davidian work. The point can be made by
comparing the watercolour sketch of 1832 with the final oil painting. Although the architectural
background remains broadly similar, the bays in the Gothic arcading of the background set up a
rhythm comparable to the columnar backdrop of The Oath ofthe Horatiu (Louvre), and the
massive pillar on the left recalls the advanced column defining the left-hand section of The
Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (illus. 62). This comparison, however, has to be

[124]
 ANN UIN GLAT TONS; DEP OSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

62 Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors ReturningtoBrutus the Bodies of his Sons, 1789,
oil on canvas.

matched by the recognition that Delaroche has constructed his scenic space with a very differ-
ent purpose in mind. His catalogue entry records that Lady Jane Grey was ‘executed in a lower
room in the Tower of London’.'°’ But the scenography is surely compatible with the tradition
that a scaffold has been erected specially for the purpose, so that we see the edge — covered
mainly by a black cloth — rather than the receding paving stones in David’s two works. The
sense of adepth opening up between the Lieutenant and the Executioner, signalled by an iron
stair-rail in the watercolour and more discreetly draped in the oil painting, accentuates the im-
pression that the spectacle has been constructed and raised into view for our perusal (illus. 75).
Yet this difference within similarity is not merely formal. It is integrally linked to the differing
emotional effects, even the differing artistic languages, proposed by the two painters. Delaroche
replaces the delicately graded tonal range of David with colour emphases, which shocked his
former teacher (and David’s pupil), the Baron Gros. In the view of Gros, who esteemed Jane
Grey far less than the Princes in the Tomer, it was an instance of ‘putting really assertive colours
next to one another, in the belief that it is more effective’.'°’ The comment is particularly inter-
esting if we take note that 1834 was the year when Chevreul began to lecture publicly on the
phenomenon of ‘complementary colours’, drawing attention to what he called the ‘simulta-
neous contrasts’ enhancing the juxtaposition of such colours as red and green/blue.'’+ In the
large sheet of studies concerned chiefly with the figure of the executioner, Delaroche has anno-
tated one particularly detailed rendering of the costume with the words ‘Rouge Olive Noir’, a
colour range that is quite accurately deployed in the rather different costume of the splendid
figure who appears in the final work (illus. 55). The divergence between David and Delaroche
cannot, however, be adequately summed up in a piecemeal comparison. It is rather a matter of
how the entire compositions work to achieve their exegetic conclusion.

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 PAU D ieikasR ©) Carre

Here the suggestive analogy with Mendelssohn’s position vis-a-vis the classical composers
who preceded him may be taken up once again, if only to demonstrate the estrangement effect
that comes from the change of medium. John Toews describes how ‘the evolving variation of a
directing “idea” or musical subject replaced the dialectical oppositions and heroic resolutions of
the classical period’. He further states that
Mendelssohn’s self-conscious, elaborate application of complex musical techniques to sustain the
identity of the musical subject through a narrative sequence oftransformative variations and enriching
episodes produced for many later listeners . . . an impression of bland homogeneity, effortless simpli-
city and ‘smoothness’. Mendelssohn, however, worked laboriously to achieve this sense ofapre-given
or ‘transcendent’ identity, not a unity immanently constructed within the work or yearned for as an
165
absent ideal or future possibility, but a unity ‘discovered’ or ‘revealed’ in an exegetical process.

However difficult it may be to make direct comparisons between the time-based medium of
music and Delaroche’s development of the plastic ‘idea’, or between the dialectical oppositions
of sonata form and the revolutionary paintings of David and his school, the analogy at least
directs us to look for the distinctiveness of Delaroche’s work in its morphological features,
relative to the prior high style, rather than dismissing it as a degenerate descent into bathos."”°
It is, of course, true that David’s paintings work by maximizing the ‘dialectical oppositions’. The
shaded Brutus meditates on the justice ofhis decision to put public before private duty, as the
dead body of one of his sons is paraded behind him. As Norman Bryson has argued, the women
in both Brutus and the Horatu exist apart from the signifying chain whereby meaning is engen-
dered, becoming ‘its victims, the marginalised objects of power and vision’."°” By contrast, the
structure of Jane Grey serves precisely to mediate, if not eliminate, any such oppositions. The
three women are indeed all, in some degree, victims. But it is the supreme victim, Jane herself,
who is the focus and fulcrum of the painting. The attendant ladies cannot bear to see what is
happening: the first looks yearningly away, while the second’s expression of grief migrates to the
pressing hands, over which Delaroche appears, from the second large sheet of drawings, to have
taken special trouble (illus. 56). But Jane does not see either: her bodily awareness 1s translated
entirely into the terms of what she feels (or feels for) in her state of disequilibrium. The two men
who do see — the Lieutenant who guides her to the block and the executioner whose attention is
caught by her fate — are not monopolizing power and vision. They are assisting in a spectacle
whose denouement they are powerless to impede. Barred by his medium for engaging in ‘trans-
formative variations’ and ‘enriching episodes’, Delaroche may yet be regarded as having persis-
tently built up a structure of repetitions and developments over the years. So the executioner’s
glance towards Jane would recall (but ina very different key) Cromwell contemplating Charles I,
whilst the conjuncture of Jane’s head with the grey fringe of the Lieutenant of the Tower would
evoke the conjoined heads (and hairstyles) of the little Princes.
More detailed consideration of what might almost be called the musical development of De-
laroche’s motifs — that is to say, their figural patterning and formal variation over time — will
follow in the next chapter. But it is important at this stage to mention a significant aspect of
Jane Grey, which supplements and, in a sense, provides a counterpoint to the Davidian refer-
ence. If Delaroche has opened up the claustrophobic space of Opie and achieved a scenic

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 SEN UN GL AT LON Ss. DE POSirT
LON Ss. MARTY
kD OM

63 Peter Paul Rubens, The Martyrdom of Saint George, 1615, oil on panel.

breadth more substantial than in any of his previous works, he has also (not for the first time)
evoked a specific tradition of Christian iconography. But where the use of the Annunciation and
Deposition patterns was (according to my argument) primarily structural, his use of the iconog-
raphy of martyrdom in Jane Grey can claim to be both structural and exegetic. Without directly
acknowledging or endorsing the Christian message as conveyed by traditional religious
subjects, he comes close to identifying the power to speak clearly to his own age with the
ability to convert and retranslate into appropriate historical settings the central symbols of
Christian witness and sacrifice.
To my knowledge, there has been no significant discussion to date ofthe close compositional
parallels between Jane Grey and the Martyrdom ofSaint George, by Rubens, which hung in the
chapel of the Crossbowmen’s Guild in Saint Gunnarus’s Church at Lier, in the Low Countries,
until 1794, when it was removed by the victorious French troops and dispatched to Paris (illus.
63).'°* Delaroche undoubtedly had a special interest in the legend of Saint George. He painted a
picture of Saint George Slaying the Dragon around 1830, and 1n 1832 had a bronze made from his
model for the central feature of the composition."’ It is more than likely that he would have
taken the opportunity to see the great Flemish painting that depicted the conclusion of the
saint’s earthly mission. This might originally have been during his early childhood, when the
work was kept in Paris. But a more consequential sighting may have taken place after 1803,
when it was sent to form part of the collection of the city of Bordeaux.
 PAUL DEL
AR OG Ek

In any event, the painting by Rubens itself formed part of an iconographic tradition, which
exemplified the special debt of Flemish painting to the Venetian school. It could be related spe-
cifically to Veronese’s great Martyrdom of Saint George, in the church of San Giorgio in Braida,
Verona, to the Martyrdom of Saint Ginesius (Prado) and to the female subject of the Martyrdom
of Saint Justina (Uffizi).'7° Delaroche could well have been aware ofprints relating to some or all
of these works. He may indeed also have been aware of a fine addition to the range by a follower
of Rubens, Thomas Bosschaert, whose Martyrdom of Saint James was also confiscated by the
French army and sent to the city of Toulouse in 1812.
The common feature of all these works, which the Saint George of Rubens shows with the
ereatest economy of effect, is that the central figure is attended by another figure who leans
over him and (in Rubens’s case) attends carefully to the binding of his arms before the execu-
tion. A further feature is the presence of the executioner himself, dressed in full armour for
Saint Ginesius (where he seems indeed to be the prototype for Opie’s stern figure) and invariably
armed with a stalwart sword. If we take the watercolour of Jane Grey as embodying Delaroche’s
first concrete plan for the painting, then it shows with considerable clarity how Delaroche might
have adapted, but immediately begun to transform, Rubens’s conception. Most striking 1s the
relationship between the two victims and the figures who bend over them, so that their heads
virtually touch: Saint George’s helper digs his thumb into the forearm of the saint at just the
point where the Lieutenant supplies his steadying guidance. Moreover the robust executioner
in Rubens’s painting is seen sideways on, with his tousled head and alert eyes turned towards
the saint: he holds his sword in hardly less credible a position than Delaroche’s equivalent, but
with equal effect insofar as he ensures that the weapon is clearly seen.
One could extend the parallels between Rubens and Delaroche to include more general, but
less psychologically loaded, features of the composition. Saint George’s execution 1s to take
place on a raised platform of stone, comparable to the cloth-covered dais set up in the Tower.
And Rubens’s dazzling array of armour, stowed in the bottom left-hand corner of the work to
testify to the saint’s prowess, recalls the flash of light on the ring that tethers the block, its
elegant plume anticipating the virtuosity of Delaroche’s spreading golden straw. But the real
interest of the comparison lies in the comprehensive way in which Delaroche seems to have
evacuated the scene of its overtly classical reference in order to instal his own form of naturalism
under historicist guise. Rubens’s Saint George may be suffering martyrdom for refusing to
worship the pagan gods, represented in the painting by the effigy of Apollo in the night back-
ground. But the two main figures indicate that the painter was following two of the most pres-
tigious of sources 1n antique statuary: the 7orso Belvedere for the figure of Saint George and the
Farnese Hercules for the broad and muscular back of the executioner. These were types of pre-
cedent that had by no means lost all their potency in the post-Napoleonic period. The 7orso
Belvedere is a source, through the intermediacy of Michelangelo, for the figure of Phlegyas in
Delacroix’s Dante and Virgil. We may well accept that the ‘minor role’ of this reference in the
case of Delacroix is (in Norman Bryson’s terms) an indication of the way in which influence
can be ‘forward-directed’, ‘coax[{ing] its user into creative action’ rather than celebrating the
weight of the past.'’’ But if we do so, we have to accept that Delaroche’s strategy is a totally

[128|
ANNUNCIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

v as peas

64 Head
of aCamoldoline Monk, 1834, oil on panel.

[129|
 LAUR
© Grit

65 Filippo Lippi Falling nm Love with his Model, 1822, oil on canyas.

[130 |
ANIN UINCLAT TONS. DI POSIT LONS. MARTYRDOM

66 Joan of Arc in Prison, 1524, oil on canvas

[ 131]
 ATR O}GaeE

67 Joan of Arc in Prison, 1824, oil on canvas.

ASNN UN Gear TOMS. DEP OSITILON'S. M RDOM

68 Death of Elizabeth, 1828, oil on cany:

 PA Ur Dah
OG aa

<

69 Crommell
and Charles I, 1831, oil on canvas.

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ANNUNCIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

Jo Princes in the Tomer, 1830, oil on canvas.

 PAUL D EAR O°Cirick

WI
"af

71 Cardinal Richelieu, 1820, oil on canvas.

= Pe Z =) Z So) = re 7p) = A O YN) re 7p = = a4 > las 2
 PAUL DE ISA RIO Gad i:

72
7 The Assassination of
) the Ducde Guise, 183.4,3 oil on canvas.

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SNUG
LAT TONS. DEP OSTTIONS., MARTY RDO M

73 Cardinal Mazarin Dying, 1830, oil on canyas.

[139 |
74 Strafford, 1836, oil on canvas.

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ANNUNCIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

:s Execution of Lady : Jane Grey, 1834,

~~ 3 oil on canvas.

76 Study for the Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1832, watercolour and
bodycolour
 PAUL Din ira ROiG Eat

77. Charles de Remusat, 1845, oil on canvas.

[142]
SNNUNCLATL
DEP ONS.
OSTITIONS. MARTYRDOM

78 Peter the Great of Russia, 1838, oil on canvas

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 PAU LD i ay ROCFE

79 Stu dy ofa man in 16th-century costume (possibly the actor Firmin), pencil drawing with pastel.

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 ANN GCIN Cleat VON Ss DP O Sit TONS. MART Y R DOM

different one. Far from giving the prestigious (and recognizable) reference a ‘minor role’ in a
new synthesis, Delaroche comprehensively reinterprets the classically indebted figuration of
Rubens, by his scrupulous historicizing method. The aim is not to dismiss the global context
and meaning of Rubens’s work, but precisely to reinvigorate the religious message in an imagi-
natively persuasive new form. Jane Grey is, in this very precise sense, a modern martyrdom.
Jane Grey thus interrogates, at the same time as it celebrates, the Western tradition of reli-
gious painting. It is an implicit critique of what, in that tradition, belongs to the antique-based
morphology of post-Renaissance art, and in the process of that critique it contrives to single out
the vital ideological element that can be reinterpreted for a contemporary audience. To date, it
has proved impossible to locate the precise source used by Delaroche for the extract describing
Jane’s execution, which he includes in the Salon catalogue. Labelled as ‘Martyrologe des Protes-
tants, publié en 1588’, it comprises a text, which corresponds in important details, but not com-
pletely, with the extensive account given in Fox’s Book of Martyrs, which had been republished
in a revised and corrected edition in London around 1782.'7 But whether Delaroche was
quoting a little-known French contemporary version based on this text or a more recent repub-
lication in French is of little consequence, compared with the fact that his aim in making this
historical citation was to bring the theme up to date — not by literary revision and republication
(as in the 1782 edition) but by investing it with renewed visual appeal.'7* Bosschaert’s Rubensian
Martyrdom of Saint James bears on its frame the simple inscription ‘Le Martyre @’un Chretien’,
presumably dating from before the time when it was liberated from its Flemish setting and dis-
patched to the strictly secular museum of Toulouse.'7* Delaroche aims, in Jane Grey, to
convince the Salon-going public with an image that is not religious in the traditional sense,
and uses a little-known motif from English history, but stands nonetheless as an experiment
in communicating just what remains of exegetic value in the tradition of Christian witness. In
that sense, the straw littering the foreground of Jane Grey may be interpreted, from our perhaps
ironic viewpoint, as an index of Delaroche’s painful avowal, ‘From now on the harvest is over’.

* * *

The appearance of Jane Grey at the Salon of 1834 marked the apogee of Delaroche’s success as a
painter of the large-scale works that were appropriate to such a form of public exhibition. After
his return from Italy in 1835, he was to send to the Salon of that year only the small cabinet
painting commissioned by the Duc d’Orléans, the Assassination of the Duc de Guise. Intensely
popular though this work was — and radically original in a way that will be investigated in the
next chapter — it stands apart from the sequence of major Salon paintings that has been traced
so far. Frustrated by his fruitless attempts to reform the system of selection, Delaroche followed
up his resignation from the Salon jury in 1836 with a refusal to take part in the exhibition of that
year. In 1837, however, he made a final Salon appearance. The two associated works that he
showed, once again with themes from English history, have clear roots in his earlier develop-
ment and close off this phase of his career.
Delaroche’s creative procedure, which demonstrably worked through a continuous process
of contrast and comparison between related motifs, inevitably drew him towards the possibility

[145|
 PAU 17D Epa RO Gaia

of paired subjects. The two cabinet paintings of Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin, com-
missioned by the Comte de Pourtalés, had participated in the immense success that Delaroche
enjoyed at the 1831 Salon. Jane Grey, as we have seen, began to occupy his attention before the
end of 1832, had been purchased before its appearance at the 1834 Salon by the rich and socially
prominent Russian collector Count Anatole Demidoff, whom he most probably met through
Eugene Lami.'? A drawing in the Louvre indicates beyond doubt that Delaroche went as far as
sketching out a possible sequel to Jane Grey, in which the Lieutenant of the Tower, with bowed
head, leads a procession bearing the coffin of the young woman down a stairway profiled against
massive Romanesque pillars: it is as if we had turned through 180 degrees and were now looking
up from the back of the platform where the execution took place.'”’ This scene is nothing more
than a temporal sequel to the scene anticipating the execution, and there is no evidence to
suggest that Delaroche took further steps to work out a composition offering little but an anti-
climactic pendant to Demidoff’s work.
The possibility exists, however, that Delaroche was encouraged — by the success of the paired
Cardinal paintings and perhaps by Demidoff himself— to think of a successor to Jane Grey. If it
was not to take the form ofa temporal sequel, it could be another work utilizing a theme from the
history of England, focusing ona situation preceding martyrdom, and even maintaining unity of
place by being situated against the grim decor of the Tower of London. Delaroche’s Strafford
fulfils all these conditions and can be shown to have an intimate thematic and structural connec-
tion both to Jane Grey and to earlier sources for his work. But if Strafford is not generally regarded
as Jane Grey’s pendant, this is because a later painting — Delaroche’s other large contribution to
the 1837 Salon — legitimately claimed that place, assisted by the favourable circumstances of pa-
tronage. Delaroche’s concentration on subjects from English history, so marked from the time of
his 1827 visit, finally paid its dividend in attracting as patrons the heirs of the Bridgewater collec-
tion, rightly regarded by Victor Cousin as having ‘the first rank in England among all private
galleries’.'’”” Strafford was bought by the Duke of Sutherland, and his brother, Lord Francis
Egerton, the future Earl of Ellesmere, acquired Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers ofCromwell.
This should not be taken to imply that Delaroche was aiming at an English market, any more
than with his earlier works; only that the appetite for subjects in English history, fuelled by Scott
and given political actuality by the fashion for parallels between the English and the French re-
volutions, provided an incentive to look further afield than the obvious points of reference.
When Delaroche put on show the relatively little-known Lady Jane Grey, it was with all the
more alacrity that the Magasin pittoresque hastened to fill any possible gaps in the audience’s
knowledge by providing a detailed account of her circumstances.'”* Doubts about the obscurity
of Strafford, from a French point of view, thus seem singularly misplaced. Not only was he
known from Guizot’s authoritative and popular studies of the history of the English Revolu-
tion, but he had also been cited at a crucial juncture of Alfred de Vigny’s Cing-Mars, the ac-
knowledged source of Delaroche’s Cardinal Richelieu. It is at one of the rare moments of
introspection by Richelieu, the antihero of both novel and painting, that he hears of the fate of
Charles P’s main counsellor, the Earl of Strafford, and muses on the inequity with which selfless
service to an absolute monarch is rewarded.'”” Strafford is thus, in one sense, a type recalling the

[146|
 SININUNECLALTTONS, DEP OSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

dying Richelieu, just as he forms part of the series of fatal happenings in the Tower of London
begun with Princes in the Tower and continued with Jane Grey.
Of course, these parallels have little substance unless they are backed up by evidence of De-
laroche’s working procedures that can demonstrate the tangible effects of such parallelism and
development of subject-matter. Goddé offers a useful and precise note on the composition of
Strafford, which refers to Delaroche’s well-known working practice but also incorporates the
important new point that this was a work produced with studio assistance:

Painted in 1835, and exhibited at the Salon of 1837, this picture was completely sketched out in 1834 by
M. Henri Delaborde, after a watercolour sketch which belonged to M. le vicomte de la Villestreux, and
a wax maquette executed by Paul Delaroche, who only took the picture up again in the summer of 1835,
on his return from Italy.'*°

There is no reason to doubt this exact account of the prehistory of Strafford. Delaroche did
indeed, from his Joan ofArc onwards, paint watercolour sketches as a preliminary to his large
compositions. In the first five months of 1834, before he set off to Italy with the young Dela-
borde, he would have been engaged in painting the Assassination of the Duc de Guise commis-
sioned by the Duc d’Orleans after just such a watercolour. There is in existence an evocative
watercolour sketch for the whole composition of Strafford (now in a private collection), which
is squared up and could well have formed the basis of Delaborde’s preliminary work (illus. 80).
Although this sketch faithfully anticipates the main structural features of the composition, it
offers an early version of the figures to the right of the composition, which was substantially
revised by Delaroche long before 1835. Godde also notes that the model for the extreme right-
hand figure, bearing a halberd, was General Boyer, and a portrait of the general, classed as a
‘study for Strafford’, is listed in the catalogue of the 1857 retrospective exhibition as ‘signed,
1833”."*! The sequence is illuminating. Delaroche completed a watercolour sketch of the whole
composition, in general terms, and created a wax maquette, before handing the project on to his
student Delaborde to be blocked out. However the precise configuration of the personages, and
in particular their faces, showing varying reactions to the historical event, still remained to be
settled; in the latter case, it required studio sittings of friends and acquaintances of Delaroche
who were doubtless selected because they corresponded to his brief for the painting. ‘The
prelate who attends Strafford and directs his sombre gaze towards him (illus. 81) is clearly indi-
cated in the watercolour sketch and may perhaps be derived from earlier pictorial sources."
But the soldier with the halberd, who glances upwards to catch the blessing of Archbishop
Laud, is a new and important feature in the composition, and required study from the life.
In its narrative articulation of the historical account, Strafford has resemblances with Jane
Grey. Where Jane Grey crystallizes around the pitiful interjection of the blindfolded victim,
Strafford shows the moment consequent upon the condemned man’s appeal to the imprisoned
archbishop, whom he has been debarred from seeing in private: ‘My Lord, your blessing and
your prayers!" The existence of the sketch showing the sequel to Jane’s execution, with the
procession slowly descending the steps, suggests a possible continuity with this case ofaproces-
sion that has been interrupted in its fateful work. There is a figure with a halberd who is one of

[147|
 PAUL DELARO GHEE

80 Study for Strafford, before 1837, pencil and watercolour.

the witnesses to the descent of Jane’s coftin. In Strafford, he has been promoted (courtesy of
General Boyer) to a crucial compositional role. Similarly the head of the procession, in the
other case the Lieutenant of the Tower, has become a splendidly clothed and hatted figure
who wheels round, clutching the Act of Attainder with which Charles has sealed his servant’s
death (illus. 82). But there is another iconographic precedent which may be more interesting,
since it relates to the possible presence in Delaroche’s memory bank ofyet another English print
from the turn of the century. William Skelton’s Tomer ofLondon, after the painting by James
Northcote, is a further image from Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, a direct sequel to his render-
ing of the Princes asleep in the shadow of their murderers (illus. 83). We could think of North-
cote’s second image as having the same relation to his earlier one, as Delaroche’s sequel sketch
to the original Jane Grey. But, more significantly, we could take it — as so often in the case of
Delaroche’s utilization of English prints — as a prototype, which needed to be comprehensively
rearranged and reinterpreted, in accord with archaeological exactitude and psychological truth.
The rather stagey portcullises of Northcote’s print have been displaced, though a single one
remains to admit the light of day in the top right-hand corner. The wholly incredible construc-
tion of the stone steps down which the corpses are bundled has been supplanted by solid stone

[148 |
SNNUNGTATIONS, DEP OSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

33, James Northcote, 7omer of London, engraving by William Skelton, ¢. 1790.

[149|
 PAUL DEE AR OG hE

stairs and a handsome balustrade with convincing Gothic detailing, as opposed to Northcote’s
paltry ogives."’+ But the main point of the comparison is to demonstrate, not Delaroche’s pains-
taking antiquarianism, but the imaginative leap that has transformed one pictorial signifier into
a quite different, overdetermined iconic expression. In Northcote’s work, two disembodied
hands appear improbably to accept the bodies of the murdered princes. In Strafford, such
hands appear to bestow the blessing of Archbishop Laud.
There seems good reason to draw attention to this feature because it was extensively, and
often adversely, commented upon. Dumas writes wrily of the blessing given by these ‘two
white hands, tremulous and aristocratic, which pass through the bars of [the] window’.">
Heine, who had by 1841 thought better of his earlier enthusiasm for Delaroche’s historical
genre, wrote witheringly of the hands of ‘Bishop Law’ as ‘not at all dissimilar to two wooden
arms of a signpost at the crossing of a large road; a prosaic device which gives an absurd
effect’."”° In the justly acclaimed engraving of Strafford by Henriquel-Dupont, this feature has
been subtly enhanced by the careful detailing, in the background, of the anguished eyes of the
archbishop, which turn upwards towards heaven (illus. 84). Henriquel-Dupont’s treatment of
the entire surface of the composition has, of course, passed by way of engraving with the burin,
and transmuted into fastidious effects of texture, what Gautier sigmatized as ‘the abuse of the
blacks’."°7
The happy reappearance of Strafford in the public context of the Council of Europe exhibi-
tion, ‘Der Traum vom Gliick’ (Vienna, September 1g96—January 1997), has however provided
an opportunity to reassess the work in the light of Gautier’s criticism. Gautier felt that the en-
graving eliminated the faults of overall colouring and retained only the cleverness of composi-
tion. But the effect of this predominantly black painting 1s anything but the waxen pallor that he

84 Detail from Strafford, engraving by Louis-Pierre Henriquel-Dupont, 1840.

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 ANNUNCIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

described. Delaroche has in fact carefully differentiated the material surfaces, so that the rich
velvet of Strafford’s cloak contrasts with the cruder stuff of his brother’s, and the silken twill
of the cleric’s robe; this being not mere virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, but an aid to the indivi-
dualized characterization of the main participants by means of an equally discriminating treat-
ment of their faces and hands (illus. 74). Laud’s eyes, so visible in the engraving, here share
pride of place with these different focuses of attention as the spectator’s eye roves over the
painted surface. They are apt to disappear almost completely from view in reproduction.
Laud’s disconnected gaze is, however, not just a random feature of the work. In fact, it
provides a useful way of relating the pictorial structure and viewing conditions of Strafford to
Delaroche’s overall progress up to this point. Even as early as the Rousseau drawing, where the
author declares his love to Madame Basile, we see the figure with outstretched arms, and on
bended knee, who partly hides behind the door as he addresses his suit not to the woman in
person, but to her mirror image. As in Strafford, the two looks do not meet, but the contact is
mediated by the word. This admittedly trivial comparison serves to bring out the kinship
between Strafford and what I have broadly called the annunciatory structure in Delaroche’s
work. Laud’s blessing, delivered to the kneeling Strafford, invokes a similar spatial effect to
the rays of light penetrating the wooden door of the bedchamber of the Princes in the Tower: an
irruption from an unseen space which freezes the gesture ofits recipient. It is also worth stres-
sing, in this connection, that the fair-haired young man who buries his face in the interrupted
procession — a feature carefully reworked after the first sketch — is the Earl of Strafford’s younger
brother.
Instantly recognizable in the right foreground of Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers ofCrommell
is a figure taken from the same fair-haired young model, for which Delaroche has left one of his
most strikingly attractive drawings (illus. 85, 86). The pencil displays a full range of tonal and
textural nuance, from the fine, curly hair to the detail of the fingers emerging from under the
arm, and the rough materials of the breeches surrounding the knee. If this drawing obviously
dates from a late stage in the establishment of the final composition, there are other fully
worked-out sketches which demonstrate that Delaroche experimented with several possibilities
before settling on the main constituents of Lord Ellesmere’s painting, the pendant to Strafford.
One shows him descending a staircase, making even clearer the link between the mocking of
Charles I and the new image of Joan of Arc Taken Prisoner, which he would contribute to the
1837 edition of Barante’s Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne (illus. 37)."* The other shows him
seated in a room, as in the final painting, but not surrounded by a press of people or accompa-
nied by the sleeping youth."*?
What Delaroche had determined to do in Charles I, after reviewing these possibilities, was in
one sense a reversion to the mood and compositional strategy of the Death ofPresident Durant
(1827), in which a single, calm, distinguished victim is surrounded by the most extreme gestural
manifestations of hostility and contempt. In fact, he was resuming a manner which he had
himself abandoned after the 1820s, but which had been continued by his followers, such as
Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, whose Scéne de la Saint Barthélemy (shown at the Salon of
1833) displayed a similar farrago of outstretched arms and leering faces within a box-like

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 PALE Dy neee
ae Re OCs
ta ke

space, lit by diamond-paned windows.'”° Delaroche has taken for the pretext of his scene the
historical detail that, during his trial, Charles I was lodged in the house of Sir Robert Cotton,
near Westminster Hall, where he ‘underwent each day the grossest insults from the soldiers
charged with keeping watch on him’.'?' But in superimposing the jovial clutter of a Dutch
tavern scene in the manner of Jan Steen on this historical tableau, he has not quite lived up to
his designation as a ‘graceful and elegant Dutchman’, in Heine’s words.'”* Some hallmarks of
his pictorial method are there. Thomas Herbert, the royal valet, looks on helplessly from his
post by the fireside column (and his solemn face, with a tear about to fill one eye, is the subject
of one of the study lithographs published by Goupil). A conclave around the window perhaps
debates the outcome of the trial, while Charles’s closest attendants drink a mock toast and blow
tobacco smoke into his face. But the painting conspicuously lacks the integration of narrative
elements with ingenuity in spatial construction, which had been a feature of Delaroche’s large
Salon paintings, at least from 1831. It compares very unfavourably with Strafford.
There are two ways of understanding the culmination of Delaroche’s career as a Salon
painter at the 1837 Salon. In the first place, it could be said that his universally acknowledged
success with the public — though not, particularly by this stage, with the critics — depended ona
shrewd calculation of what an effective painting had to be, in these particular circumstances of
exhibition. Although he was certainly successful with the Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal
Mazarin pair, and with the Assassination of the Duc de Guise, it could be argued that their notori-
ety remained contingent on his ability to create a sequence of large-scale paintings, which reg-
ularly put his name before the public, from 1824 onwards. These characteristically involved life-
size figures, and yet Delaroche’s manipulation of space never, until Charles J, restricted itself to
the establishment of a box-like perspective, prolonging the literal space of the exhibition room.
It involved, as has been shown here, a dynamic representation in pictorial terms of what could
be termed ‘on-’ and ‘off-stage’, with a consequent mobilization of attention to the limits of the
internal volumes, and their relationship to the framing edge. Both Annunciation and Deposi-
tion structures could be deployed, alternately, to achieve this effect.
By the stage of Jane Grey, Delaroche had acquired the ability to work this mechanism
without having to create, through anecdotal means, the fiction of an ‘off space. But, in effect,
the tense relationship created between the spectator and the image in this work depends on our
strong sense that the platform of execution has been raised up in front of us (like the painting
itself), thus creating the illusion of a lower space, in the background, which corresponds to our
own less elevated placing. Gautier shrewdly recognized the progress achieved in Jane Grey, by
comparison with the Death of Elizabeth, when he noted Delaroche’s mastery of his method in
the former: ‘In [Jane Grey], at least, the artist does what he wants to do. He realizes his concep-
tion with absolute assurance.'°’ The lessons of this achievement are not lost in Strafford, where,
if we can reserve the criticism of the painted surface, the ingenious conception of the inter-
rupted, downward procession and the matching, annunciatory appeal ensures a similar engage-
ment in the represented space.
Yet Charles I, where none of this ingenuity can be detected, draws attention to the second, no
less important aspect of Delaroche’s development as an artist through the successive Salons. If

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ANNUNCIATIONS, DEPOSITIONS, MARTYRDOM

~ a3)

85 Study for Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers ofCromwell, before 1836,

pencil drawing.
 PAUL DEWAR OG Et &

he had succeeded in becoming, in Heine’s memorable phrase, ‘the court painter of all beheaded
Majesties’,'°* this was not because of a disposition to royalism, or indeed to whatever role in
post-Revolutionary France might most clearly correspond to that of ‘court painter’. It was
because a beheaded king, or a queen for a few days, such as Lady Jane Grey, was an exemplary
victim: a figure of the martyr for a period when the traditional resources of religious painting
could no longer be effectively exploited, except by ironic adaptation (as for the Annunciation
motifs) or effectively concealed allusion (as in Jane Grey).
Who, then, are the victims for whom the decapitated monarchs stand in exemplary substitu-
tion? Inevitably Delaroche was drawn, later in his career, to exercise his skill and his dedication
as an artist on the problem of representing the universal victim emerging from the Western
cultural and religious experience, Jesus Christ. The failure of Charles J as a painting 1s perhaps
the result of a too-ready association between the period detail of a Dutch tavern scene and the
motif of Christ mocked by the Roman soldiers, which was noted as a source by Gautier at the
time.'”? But Delaroche had good cause, in 1836, to muse on the contemporary significance of
the ‘victim’ in so far as it related to the artist as an exemplary figure as well as to the general
aftermath of the revolution. In the summer of 1835, he had delivered a funeral oration on
behalf of his fellow former students beside the coffin of Baron Gros, whose last days had, in
his phrase, been ‘heaped with bitterness’ as a result of the ‘thoughtless criticisms’ directed at
his later work.'®° It is worth noting that he cites, in his short tribute, simply one work, which
will characterize Gros’s claim to be admired by posterity: it is, of course, not surprisingly, Bo-
naparte Visiting the Pesthouse at Jaffa, which welded together in one contemporary scene refer-
ences to classical statuary, to the healing mission of Christ and to the tradition of the
thaumaturgic Christian king.°’ Delaroche’s own withdrawal from the Salon after 1837,
however little influenced by his estimate of the damage done to Gros by his public exposure,
was to close one chapter of his artistic life and open another. Napoleon became, for Delaroche,
the only deposed monarch worthy of repeated representation. But in representing Napoleon,
he was also exposing to view, as his experience of life progressed, the darker side of his own self-
consciousness as an artist.
 THREE

Portraits to Panoramas

CEO

N THE sequence of paintings that has just been traced, Delaroche established the prestige of
historical genre. When he himself
had retired from the Salon, this achievement continued to
resonate throughout Europe, as artists in neighbouring countries exploited the historical
culture of the period to gain new markets and new relationships with the viewing public.’ But
to view Delaroche simply as the master of historical genre is to misunderstand even this socially
and aesthetically important aspect of his artistic production; it also makes it difficult to appreci-
ate the course that his career took after 1837. Attention has already been given to the way in
which Delaroche, not being a ‘born painter’, constructed an artistic self and established both a
name and a signature. Delaroche withdrew from the emulative disciplines of the master’s
studio, as it existed in the period immediately following the fall of the empire and the exile of
David, and began to draw upon a more eclectic set of influences. But this process had a further
corollary, from a practical and technical point of view. It left open the question: precisely what
sort of artist could Delaroche aspire to be?
In one sense, the reputation that Delaroche achieved for historical genre is a sufficient index
of the means of working this issue out in practice. Not choosing to take upon himself the
authority of a master, Delaroche made history his master: that is to say, he displaced the quest
for the true style on to the search for the right source, a quest more likely to succeed. This might
require archival research, and even a journey to England, to ascertain the detail of a costume or
the carving of a piece of furniture. There could be no guarantee that the public, or the critics,
would take the trouble to follow and check the process of verification that the artist had
followed, and indeed the critics could hardly be blamed for rejecting as not verisimilitudinous
a recondite point which had only the artist’s authority behind it.* But at least the artist had in his
favour the general intellectual tendency of the age. In making himself, to a certain extent, an
antiquarian, he participated with scholars, writers and other artists, who were likewise rejecting
the hegemony of ideas — as in the eighteenth century — and humbly submitting themselves to
the tyranny of fact.
Yet the question ‘what sort of an artist could Delaroche aspire to be?’ was not definitively
solved by his practice of historical genre. One could say that historical painting temporarily re-
conciled, at the time of its emergence, elements in Delaroche’s creative persona, which were
otherwise all too liable to fly apart. The French art historian, Pierre Francastel, once remarked
4 propos of Léger’s well-advertised dislike of Picasso, that ‘there are some artists who work on

[155|
 PAU ED Ral AVRO) Gr

the flowers and others who work on the honey’ By this distinction, he meant to differentiate
those who readily took to the traditional challenge of the studio model (Picasso) and those who
preferred to compose with images of asecond order, already existing as stereotypes within mass
culture (Leger). But if we apply this judgement to Delaroche, in his different historical circum-
stances, we can see that he passionately valued working on the flowers and on the honey. That is
to say, he responded vividly and immediately to the challenge of the live model: his success in
‘capturing a likeness’ was constantly acknowledged, and will be further analysed in this chapter.
However he also never tired of collating and refining already prepared images, in his case not
from the world of advertising and mass culture, but from the repertoires ofprints and the newly
published historical sourcebooks that his father and uncle must have first brought to his atten-
tion, and which he himself continued to collect.
The difficulty was that these antagonistic interests, potentially reconcilable in historical
genre, did not permit Delaroche to achieve a unified and harmonious way of working, both
related to and independent from the masters of the French tradition: in a word, they did not
permit him to achieve a s¢y/e. In this regard, Delaroche’s decision to exclude the quintessential
French academic painter Charles Lebrun from the gallery of illustrious painters in the Hému-
cycle was a faithful index of his rejection of the whole concept of the academic style and its con-
sequences: these being, of course, not the product of an eternal essence, but of a strictly defined
set of historical circumstances in the monarchical culture of late seventeenth-century France.
One might say that, if Lebrun was absent from this multicoloured array of artists of all ages, it
was indeed a kindness to spare him the embarrassment of appearing in a format so antagonistic
to his own aims and ideals: one that set a premium on the historically accurate realization of
each figure, and placed the whole sequence within a vast half-circle closely approximating to
the form of popular spectacle known as the panorama. Just how far this suggestive analogy
can be taken will be investigated later in this chapter.
The extent to which Delaroche’s artistic persona posed problems of classification, not only
by comparison with the stylistic ideal represented by Lebrun but also in relation to its nine-
teenth-century updating in the work and teaching of Ingres, comes across very clearly in the
reactions that he provoked in one of the most influential of mid-century critics (and his
former pupil), Charles Blanc. Brother of the socialist pioneer Louis Blanc, and himself a
radical thinker (whose aesthetic attitudes expose the fatuity of associating so-called juste-
milieu artists with conservatism), Blanc was the founder-editor of the remarkable Gazette des
Beaux-Arts which arrived just soon enough to assess the legacy of Delaroche after the retrospec-
tive exhibition of 1857.+ Not the least revealing of his tributes is the brief essay with which he
accompanied the posthumous publication of one of Delaroche’s drawings, Le Génie captif, in
1859. The title, incidentally, was Blanc’s own, and the drawing itself hardly typical of Delaro-
che’s work. But it gave him the opportunity for a homily on its evident tensions and inconsis-
tencies.
For Charles Blanc, first of all, Delaroche’s drawings were valuable because they showed a
variety and spontaneity, which the finished works failed to achieve. ‘Whether the artist com-
pleted them lovingly, or left them in the state of a sketch after jotting them down impatiently

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with his pen, or burdened them with all the second thoughts of the pencil, the master turns out
to be easier, freer and often more emotional than in his finished works, Blanc believed that this
striking difference was indeed a direct consequence of the division between the public and the
private spheres in Delaroche’s life. When he painted a work for the Salon, he was ‘constantly
preoccupied with what people would say, always oppressed by the criticisms in store’. On the
other hand, when he worked ‘on his own account, in the presence of a favoured pupil, in the
silence and intimacy of his home, en déshabille, so to speak, he could surprise people with his
‘facility. . . abundant imagination, lightness of spirit, accent and hand’>
There are innumerable examples to demonstrate the qualities which Charles Blanc found in
Delaroche’s drawings — which makes it all the more regrettable that, up to the present time,
they have received little, if any, serious attention. One case which fits Blanc’s criteria in a spe-
cially significant way is the splendidly vigorous, yet fully worked-out pencil drawing which
served as a sketch for the painting Henrietta ofFrance Pursued by the Army of Crommell. Appear-
ing in the 1839 Salon, this painting was in fact not the work of Delaroche himself, who had
ceased to exhibit after 1837, but that of his young pupil Charles Béranger (1816-53): in the
print of the finished work, Delaroche’s priority is acknowledged, in addition to the note, ‘Ch.
Béranger pinxit’.° While devising this assignment for a ‘favoured pupil’, who had the hard
work of painting still to do, and the Salon criticism to negotiate, Delaroche has allowed
himself a virtuoso display of pencilwork, from the lazy lines that show the lie of the landscape
to the rosettes of foliage and the graphite wedges that convey the texture of Henrietta’s robe
(illus. 87). Drawing on his own record of similar sentimental subjects, going back to Children
Surprised by a Storm (1825, location unknown) and Miss Macdonald (illus. 20), he has persua-
sively evoked the genteel panic of Charles I’s French wife, as the Roundhead troops pass by on
the upper level. He also perhaps anticipates, in the divided levels and the woodland glade shel-
tered by a stalwart tree, the composition that Delacroix later used for Jacob Wrestling mith the
Angel (1857-60, St Sulpice).
The special charm of the sketch for Henrietta is associated with the fact that it was (we can
assume) done specifically for the benefit of the young Beranger, then at the age at which Dela-
roche began his own public career. But the tension ofwhich Blanc writes can be observed in the
context of a single sheet of studies, where the range of marks varies from the most fine and
minute use of the pencil to convey decorative detail, to its more expansive employment in
free, sweeping lines that follow the movement of the arm. The studies relating to the elaborate
plate that contains the head ofJohn the Baptist, in Delaroche’s Herodias (1843), incorporate two
variant forms of classical moulding, the first showing a ring-and-scroll motif similar to the final
design and the second a remarkable shell motif above a more clearly defined claw foot (illus. 88).
The head of the saint is almost spectrally present in the first case, as if the fetishistic attraction
of the part-object had migrated to the plate with its odd, animalistic feet. However, the faint line
drawings at the left-hand side of the sheet recover the total conception of head and bowl
together, precisely by avoiding the fixation of specific details and allowing the to-and-fro hand
movement to create its own rhythm.’
Only in rare passages does Delaroche get the opportunity to let his paintwork reproduce, in

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87 Henrietta of France Pursued by the Army of Cromwell, c. 1838, pencil drawing.

some fashion, the spontaneous action shown by so many of the drawings. The suggestion of the
scarlet silk showing through the white sleeves of the robe of Cardinal Beaufort in Joan ofArc
(illus. 67) is an example already given. And in Herodias, where the head of John the Baptist and
the bowl containing it are both highlighted in similarly intense detail, it is the exotic sleeve of
Herodias’s costume that catches our attention, because of the free mixing and blending of
colours to create the iridescent hue (illus. 132). Charles Blanc is surely right to combine his
analysis of the free elements in Delaroche’s drawings, and their failure to show through in the
completed paintings, with the predilection he showed for direct modelling in clay. This

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88 Study for Herodias, before 1843, pencil drawing.

became, of course, an activity ancillary to his painting, when he set up the compositions for his
large Salon works. But Blanc mentions an interesting aspect of his production at the end ofthe
Restoration, which could have led to a more integral presentation.
No doubt as a consequence of his success with the Duc d’Angouléme at the Taking ofthe Troca-
déro (1828), Delaroche was offered, in the concluding years of the Restoration, the opportunity to
decorate a ceiling in the Louvre, in that part of the building devoted to the Musée Charles X.*
When he presented his sketch to Sosthenes de La Rochefoucauld, the Directeur des Beaux-Arts,
he supplemented his proposed painting — of the /nterview between Louis XIV and James IT at
Saint-Germain — with a conjectural moulding of allegorical figures around the main subject.
This proposal got no further than the architect in charge of the Louvre, Fontaine, who may
have seen it as ‘a sort of encroachment in practice by the painter, who thus went outside his
frame to mingle his personal fantasy with the general motifs of sculptural decoration’.’ Dela-
roche was surely aware that he had become involved — not for the last time — in a territorial
dispute with architects, as well as infringing a taboo which had great symbolic importance in
the construction of the French classical tradition. It was Lebrun himself who insisted that the
decorations for the palace of Versailles under Louis XIV should be, in effect, framed paintings
inserted throughout the splendid sequence of salons that formed the state apartments, and that
they should not derogate from their intellectual status by acknowledging any connection with the
work of lesser beings, such as the stucco artists, involved in the same overall scheme.'° To
conceive of a proposal involving both painting and modelled figures, as Delaroche did, was to
risk disturbing the fragile equilibrium on which the surviving tradition of French Classicism
was based.

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Meeting with rejection for this project, Delaroche displayed the commendable refusal to
compromise that was to be a feature of his later career, and withdrew from the commission,
despite La Rochefoucauld’s warning that this action would cause him to be eliminated from
the ‘list of painters in favour’.'' The Restoration regime ended soon enough for this threat to
have no practical consequences. But a further commission by the new government of Louis-
Philippe, as early as 1830, gave him the opportunity to submit designs for a decorative scheme
in honour of the navigator La Perouse, and he once again included two allegorical figures in
relief in the composition.'* Nothing came of the project, which may have been cancelled for
reasons unconnected with Delaroche’s mixture of the genres. Nevertheless, these two experi-
ences are surely significant if we relate them to Delaroche’s subsequent, and far from easy, ex-
perience with schemes involving architecture. It was only with the Hemicycle at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts that he was able to request, and receive, the measure of control over the entire
space that he needed.
Delaroche’s career as a modeller was therefore abortive. It received a sudden boost, again in
the last years of the Restoration, when Amedee de Pastoret, whose family’s prominence at the
Bourbon court will be explained shortly, saw the previously mentioned small maquette for a
statue of Saint George Slaying the Dragon in Delaroche’s studio, and proposed that it should be
cast as a bronze of ‘colossal proportions’ and erected at the centre of one of the open spaces in
the Champs Elysées.'* The Revolution of 1830, after which the Pastoret family insisted on
maintaining their loyalty to the deposed dynasty, deprived this exciting prospect of any degree
of realism that it might have had.
The frustration that must have ensued from these attempts to model in sculpture and relief
is credibly associated by Blane with Delaroche’s desire to find other outlets for his creativity
than the strenuous discipline of the major Salon painting. And Blanc is right to see the different
attitudes perceptible in the drawings as symptomatic of a wish to respond freely to the possibil-
ities of his medium while keeping a strict end in mind. But there was one particular sphere
where Delaroche could, at least to some extent, elude the ‘perpetual mental tension’, which
Blanc saw coming through the major Salon paintings.'*+ This was the province of portraiture,
in which Delaroche could perhaps entertain the pleasant — and not wholly inappropriate —
fiction that his audience was not the Salon-goer or the critic, but the person sitting directly
there in front of him.

* * *

Richard Brilliant begins his highly original and stimulating book on portraiture by listing three
different questions to which the portrait artist must respond in satisfying the demands of ‘the
individual’s wish to endure’. ‘What do I look like?’ is the first, since ‘visual recognition by the
viewer’ is an essential precondition of the genre. ‘What am I like? is the second, since ‘the por-
traitist’s characterisation penetrates beneath the surface of appearances’. This requirement is
however necessarily conditioned by the culturally given notions of character, which dictate
that ‘queens are regal . . . and intellectuals intellectual’, while well-known individuals come to
be recognised by ‘salient aspects of behaviour’. The third question is: ‘Who am I?’ This can be

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answered, as Brilliant recognizes, in all kinds of different ways: most commonly, the portraitist
settles for a ‘social designator’, such as senator, industrialist or noble lord, but with the advan-
tage of real insight into the subject on the viewer’s part, the ‘perception of an essential charac-
teristic, such as George Sand’s alienation . . . or Goethe’s humanisny can serve as the content of
the representation."°
This is how Brilliant begins a study which is chronologically vast in its scope. But, just as the
last two examples are chosen from the century between 1750 and 1850, so his final example in
the book is taken from an exemplary tale of the Romantic period, Balzac’s Colonel Chabert. This
superb story, first published in 1832, revolves around the reappearance, in Restoration France,
of a heroic officer in Napoleon’s army who was left for dead after the Battle of Eylau and made
his way back, after innumerable difficulties, to find his wife married to a royalist aristocrat and
more than reluctant to acknowledge him. As Balzac finely notes, Chabert’s name is written with
honour in the annals of military history. But this does not stop him from dying, in the end, as an
unacknowledged number, in the poorhouse of Bicetre. In Brilliant’s terms: “The tragic separa-
tion of Chabert’s name from his person had destroyed his identity, and with it his life, separat-
ing for ever the nominal sign from its still living, but no longer legitimate, referent’."° Ifthis is a
parable for the student of portraiture, it is because it demonstrates how history can prise apart
the components of identity which the portrait artist seeks to suture by the very process of re-
presentation.
Delaroche’s career as a portrait painter was inevitably set within the general parameters de-
scribed by Brilliant. But, more particularly, 1t was involved with the portrayal of sitters who had
nearly all, to some degree, caught a dose of Chabert’s malady: that 1s to say, they had experi-
enced in the course of the Revolution and Empire a series of abrupt shifts in social identity
and, as the Restoration yielded place to the July Monarchy, these changes in the public
persona of the political and intellectual elite had by no means come to an end. Delaroche was
not the finest portrait painter of his period in France; that title must go without hesitation to
Ingres. But he was arguably the portrait painter who most sensitively responded to the condi-
tions just described, and who discerned how it might be possible to compensate in the portrait
image for some of the infelicities of modern history.
Delaroche’s first portrait studies included, significantly, the artists surviving from pre-revo-
lutionary times who were his patrons and mentors: Constant Desbordes, the lodger at La
Childeberte who arranged for Fra Lippo Lippi to be shown at the Salon of Douai in 1823,'7
and Jean-Frédéric Schall, whose vivacious face and penetrating eyes he recorded lovingly
(illus. 13). His first major commissioned portrait, however, involved a figure who was irretrieva-
bly associated with the Restoration settlement, the husband of the distressed lady whom Gros
had painted making her tearful adieu to Pauillac in 1818 (illus. 6). The Duc d@’Angouleme was
the eldest son of the Comte d’Artois, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, and after the acces-
sion of his father to the throne as Charles X in 1824, he became Dauphin of France. In 1823,
when Chateaubriand was minister of foreign affairs, it had been decided to revive an active
French foreign policy and make a military intervention in the affairs of the neighbouring
country, Spain, which was also ruled by a restored Bourbon monarchy and was undergoing a

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 PAW) Dik ia hy OliGank

3 is Mes 7 5 es ss a)

89 Sketch for The Taking ofthe Trocadero, 31 October 1823, 1827, ink drawing with watercolour and body colour.

period of liberal uprising. The Duc d’Angouléme took part in the expedition, whose success in
dislodging the Spanish liberals was matched by its immense value as propaganda to the
Bourbon government; it was, after all, the first military initiative of the Restoration, and to
some extent compensated for the conclusive defeat of Waterloo and the humiliating occupation
of France by foreign troops that was its consequence.
Delaroche has chosen to depict the Duc d’Angouleme at the taking of the Trocadero, a for-
tification near Cadiz which was stormed on 31 October 1823, in the closing stages of the suc-
cessful campaign. He shows him in profile, surveying the scene at the beginning of the battle,
with his general staff arrayed behind him. This large painting 1s at present rolled and stored at
Versailles but a recently discovered sketch of particularly fine quality clearly demonstrates the
main features of the composition (illus. 89). Delecluze noted in his journal the relation between
this large-scale work and the later paintings of David such as the Coronation, ‘affected at the
same time by public events and the defection of taste’."* But when Delaroche was asked to
paint a second work, concentrating more exclusively on the main figure, he mobilized a more
contemporary reference (illus. go). The triangular construction of the second picture and details
such as the dead hand protruding from debris in the right foreground recall Delacroix’s
threnody for Greek independence, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, shown in Paris for the
first time in 1826.
The fact that a portrait not obviously heroic in traditional terms should have impelled the
cultural authorities to make the second commission is a good measure of Delaroche’s preco-
cious ability to suit contemporary requirements. Gros had painted portraits of both the Duc

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90 The Duc d’Angouléme at the Taking of the Trocadero, 31 October 1823, 1828, oil on canvas.

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and the Duchesse d’Angouléme as early as 1816, but they were held to be unconvincing, and the
project of perpetuating them in the traditional ancien régime form of a Gobelins tapestry was
adjourned for this reason. Delaroche’s portrait of the Duc in the Taking ofthe Trocadero was in-
stantly acclaimed, when it was shown at the 1827/28 Salon, for ‘achieving resemblance more
happily than any other artist’.'? Indeed the success was embarrassing, since moves were imme-
diately made to extract the Duc’s figure from the composition and make it the subject of a
Gobelins tapestry; Sosthenes de La Rochefoucauld maintained, against the more realistic argu-
ments of the Comte de Forbin, that this strategy would be viable in spite of the fact that the pose
of the figure depended intimately on the scene within which it was set. As a compromise, De-
laroche was invited to compose his second work, a full-length portrait, which would be ‘taken
from the picture without being an exact copy of it’. This was to serve not only as a cartoon for
the tapestry but also as ‘a regulative type of the Prince’s features, a type which would be con-
sulted in the future each time a portrait of the Prince would be commissioned’.”°
In Brilliant’s terms, Delaroche had answered the three criteria of portraiture with an unusual
degree of success. He had convincingly responded to the challenge ‘What does he look like?’ He
had provided a nuanced answer to the question ‘What is he like?’ by showing the subject’s self-
reflexive attitude to the heroic role. He had also provided a ‘type’, which defined his identity as
the heir to the throne. The last achievement was, of course, the most precarious since, 1n a very
short time, the new Dauphin ceased to play a role in the dynastic succession, when his father
was driven out by Louis-Philippe. But it is interesting to reflect that the second Taking ofthe
Trocadero to some extent perpetuated the only national identity that this unlucky Bourbon had
been able to achieve. Close to the fall of the July Monarchy and the dismissal in their turn of the
Orleans family, an engraving by Francois after Delaroche’s painting was included in a compila-
tion entitled Galeries historiques de Versailles.*
It is not clear whether Delaroche got as far as the looms with his second portrait, and his
services to the elder branch of the Bourbon dynasty ceased with their exile. But there is one
further commission which Delaroche undertook, not long after the Taking of the Trocadero,
which was destined to have its fulfilment in the decorative arts, and which involved an
original, though quite different solution to the issue of typification. The Orleans family were
extremely attached to the historic Chateau d’Eu, near to the coast at Le Treport on the
northern borders of Normandy. This domain, which had in the Renaissance period been the
property of the Ducs de Guise, had been left to Louis-Philippe by his mother, and after his
accession to the throne moves to refurbish it as a home for the royal family were started imme-
diately. Among the projects was a decorative scheme involving stained glass for the new private
chapel of the chateau. Delaroche was invited to submit a painting on which the main panel of
glass, representing Saint Amelia, was to be based.
Saint Amelia had been chosen because of her special meaning for Louis-Philippe’s queen,
Marie-Amelie, the daughter of King Ferdinand IV of Sicily, and it is obvious that Delaroche
conceived the whole composition as a group portrait of the female members of the Orléans
family. ‘The Queen had three young daughters, and the original sketch for the composition
shows the juxtaposed faces as recognizably similar to other representations of the time, such

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Sea
gt Study for Saint Amelia, 1831, drawing with watercolour. 92 Saint Amelia (1831), engraving by Paul Mercuri, 1837.

as Winterhalter’s later painting of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert Received by King Louts-
Philippe and his Family at the Chateau d’Eu (still in the collection of the Chateau d’Eu).*+ The
delicate angel, who seems to have stepped straight out of a Van Eyck, must surely represent
the Queen’s youngest daughter, who was born in 1817 (illus. gr).
In the absence of Delaroche’s completed painting, which has been lost — and of the window
itself, which is at present undergoing restoration — it is the exceptionally fine print by Paul
Mercuri after the painting that gives the most satisfactory rendering of Delaroche’s intentions
(illus. 92). In comparison with the original watercolour sketch, the faces have been softened and
made more regular. Saint Amelia, who is shown decking with flowers the altar she had erected
in her father’s garden, now has a rugged landscape to show that the act ofworship is taking place
in the open air. Mercuri shows, moreover, that the barely visible crucifix and candlesticks on the
altar had been replaced, in the painting, by a splendid Gothic monstrance, balancing the
gorgeous (but improbable) jardiniére that dominates the lower left-hand side of the composi-
tion.
But these piecemeal comparisons fail to detect the most important feature of the composi-
tion as a whole, which is its very probable reliance on two clear sources that Delaroche had

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occasion to know well. He certainly owned a copy (as has been noted before) of the French
edition of Camille Bonnard’s Costumes des XIITe, XIVe et XVe stécles, published in Paris in
1829~30.~” Paul Mercuri, who was to produce the print after Saint Amelia, had made his repu-
tation as an engraver with his contributions to this work of unprecedented scope and illustrative
finesse. His striking group involving the Queen of Cyprus with a child and two other Venetian
ladies, which is extracted from Gentile Bellini’s Miracolo della Croce al Ponte di San Lorenzo (Ac-
cademia, Venice), must surely have suggested to Delaroche the possibility of a parallel grouping
of women, with the crowned head to the fore: attention to the models has, however, modified
the strictness of the Venetian composition, and resulted in more individual poses (illus. 93).
Yet Mercurt’s costume print was perhaps less important, in Delaroche’s general conception,
than the reference to a late medieval French manuscript which had been accessible since 1792 in
the Department of Manuscripts of the future Bibliotheque Nationale in the Rue Richelieu.”
The Book of Hours ofAnne de Bretagne was described, when a facsimile edition was published
in 1860, as ‘one of the most perfect monuments of French art from the end of the fifteenth
century ... a striking witness to the taste, and the elevated intelligence of the Queen-
Duchess, who entrusted to the hands of the most able painters of her time, the execution of
the book in which she said her prayers to God each day?” Delaroche, whose personal collection
included two medieval books of hours and several other detached illuminations, must have
been aware of this work and its reputation even at this comparatively early date. His own Saint
Amelia (in the original painting and the Mercuri print) incorporates a surprising outdoor
setting, with a rocky landscape, and has the central figure praying to a makeshift table on
which (another addition after the sketch) a prayer-book has been placed; in this respect, it
recalls the famous frontispiece of Anne de Bretagne with attendant saints, which also offers

93 Paul Mercuri, Study afier Gentile Bellini, engraving, 1829.

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94 Frontispiece to reproduction of Book of Hours of Anne de Bretagne, Paris, c. 1860.

crowns and details of dress more appropriate to a medieval setting than the Venetian tableau of
Gentile Bellini (illus. 94). While there is virtually nothing, in either of these pre-existing images,
that Delaroche could be said to have literally copied, a close comparison of the features of all
three indicates a very subtle process of selection and development of particular motifs. The
end-product is a composition in which another Queen-Duchess, Marie-Amelie d’Orleans, is
subtly complimented by appearing, with the female members of her family, in the guise of a
late medieval monarch accompanied by her patron saints.~?

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 PAW ED EL ACR © (Gang

In both the examples mentioned, Delaroche could be said to have taken the portrait ‘from
the life’ to a stage of typification consonant with the royal status of the models. The Duc d’An-
gouléme became the prince as military hero, though in a modern and less overtly heroic mode,
while Queen Marie-Amélie lent her features to a royal saint, and at the same time became the
protagonist in an icon of contemporary family life, which suited the style of the new monarchy.
However Delaroche had more work to do, in the way of finding an appropriate type, in his com-
missioned portraits of the politicians and statesmen of the post-revolutionary period. This was
certainly true of his first major assignment as a portraitist after the Duc d’Angouléme pair, when
in 1829 he painted the recently appointed chancellor of France, the Marquis de Pastoret.
Although he was no Colonel Chabert, Claude de Pastoret had traversed a career of quite extra-
ordinary variety before reaching this eminent post in the last year of the Restoration. Both a
practising member of the noblesse de robe and an outstanding legal scholar before the Revolution,
he had refused the post of minister of justice in 1790, but sat in the legislative assembly and
remained in Paris until he was forced to emigrate to Switzerland during the Terror. Under the
Empire, he was professor of law at the College de France (1804) and then professor of philoso-
phy at the Sorbonne (1809), receiving the title of comte de !empire and senator from Napoleon.
Having rallied to the Bourbons immediately in 1814, he helped to draw up the constitutional
charter, which regulated the new system of government; and he entered the House of Peers
(from 1817 as a marquis). His appointment as chancellor in 1829 was the culmination of this
highly distinguished legal and political career. But it lasted barely a year, as Pastoret refused to
swear allegiance to Louis-Philippe and was relieved of his post. Having pledged himself to the
Bourbon dynasty in 1814, Pastoret remained loyal to them for the rest of his life, and in 1838 was
named tutor to the children of the late Duc de Berry, who included the legitimist heir to the
throne.
In what way could Delaroche approach the Marquis de Pastoret as a type, quite apart from
fixing the likeness of the elderly statesman, then nearly seventy-five years old? The issue was
made more complicated, no doubt, by the fact that the Pastoret family had demonstrated an
impressive taste for superior portrait painting in the previous decades. David’s fine (though un-
finished) portrait of Madame de Pastoret (Art Institute of Chicago) had remained in his studio
after being painted around 1792, but was purchased by the family after his death in 1826.°°
The child of the sitter and the future Marquis de Pastoret, who can be seen in his cradle in
David’s portrait, was painted in the year of this purchase by Ingres, in his Portrait d’homme: le
comte Amédée de Pastoret (Art Institute of Chicago).** Delaroche was being asked, in effect, to
complete a family trio which had been commenced by the leading classicist painters of the
two previous generations. His own addition to the series did not, however, disgrace him. In
contrast to the equivocal image of a self-important young man, which Ingres provided, Dela-
roche has created a relaxed and reflective persona for the scholar and statesman, not neglecting
the brilliant trophies of the Order of the Saint-Esprit (above) and the Grand Cross of the
Legion @honneur (below), but taking the pretext of the chancellor’s wine-red robes to
produce a bravura rendering of surfaces and textures (illus. 95). As has been just remarked, the
delectation in such textural effects, which Delaroche displays — without distracting attention

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5 Marquis de Pastoret, 1829, oil on canvas.

 PAUL DETAR OG GERE

from the alert, elderly face — is characteristic of the court painting of the previous century. De-
laroche has ensured that the head is framed by the broken Rococo line of achair moulding from
the ancien régime, owing nothing to Napoleon’s Empire style, as if to accentuate the chancellor’s
harmonious relationship with the Bourbon dynasty.
That the Marquis de Pastoret approved of the image Delaroche had created for him 1s
evident from a letter, which he wrote to the painter in 1839, when Henriquel-Dupont was
about to produce his engraving based on the portrait. The old man, who was to die in the fol-
lowing year, gracefully thanked Delaroche for ‘the kindness which you put into the execution of
this fine work’ and concluded: ‘Your brush will have given me. . . a celebrity which I shall be
happy to owe to you, and I am pleased to attach to your talent the memory that people will
retain of me? This comment is made all the more poignant by the fact that Pastoret’s
armorial bearings (visible in a bravura oil sketch at the Musee de Bayonne) have been eliminated
in the final work, and the inscription in the right-hand top corner of the painting commemo-
rating his offices has also been virtually effaced, no doubt as a result of the abrupt change in his
political circumstances.* Delaroche’s hope of exhibiting his finished painting in the Salon was
dashed by the public refusal of Pastoret to swear allegiance to Louis-Philippe. But the engraving
helped to perpetuate the congenial type that Delaroche had devised, in which a conscious play
with the history of pictorial forms produced an answer to the question: ‘Who am I?’
Delaborde saw a distinct improvement in Delaroche’s skill as a portraitist between the
Pastoret of 1829 and the Guizot of 1837, which was his next major portrait of a political figure
(illus. 96). He saw this progress as being maintained when, towards the end of his career, Dela-
roche painted such works as Comte Charles de Réemusat (1845; Musee du Vieux Toulouse) and
Adolphe Thiers (1856; Bibliotheque Thiers, Paris).*+ It is hard to agree with the implied relega-
tion of the Pastoret, though this is indeed consistent with Delaborde’s views on the showiest
phase ofDelaroche’s early work. It 1s equally hard not to see Guizot as one of his most memo-
rable achievements in the genre, and a radical new departure in style (if not in quality) compared
with the bravura brushwork of Pastoret. Francois Guizot was, no less than the royalist chancel-
lor, a victim of the revolutionary years who had established a formidable reputation as an intel-
lectual and man of letters before moving steadily closer to the political scene. Born to a family of
the Protestant haute bourgeoisie in Nimes in 1787, he published as an art critic under the Empire
while preparing himself for a major career as a historian, which burgeoned in the 1820s. Guizot
had been close to political power in the first years of the Restoration, as a member of the small
intellectual caucus known as the Doctrinaires who had disproportionate influence with Louis
XVIPs minister and favourite, Decazes. But the swing to the Right after the assassination of
the Duc de Berry in 1820 freed him for his historical pursuits. After the July Revolution of1830,
Guizot immediately became one of the pillars of the new regime. Initially minister of the
interior for a brief period, he served on three occasions as minister of public instruction
between 1832 and 1837, when Delaroche’s portrait was completed.
As a specialist in the history of England, Guizot was a major contributor to the Romantic his-
torical culture from which Delaroche drew sustenance, and to which he also contributed; it has
generally been accepted that he was responsible for entrusting Crommell to the collection of his

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96 I ?rancois € ul
u zol, 18: 37, oil on ¢ “any as.

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 PAW DE LAR @O Geen

home town, Nimes. Correspondence between artist and sitter from the period when the portrait
was under way indicates a cordial relationship, with Guizot informing Delaroche of the periods
when he could take time off from his duties and delicately referring to other work in the studio.*°
By this stage, Delaroche had returned from his first Italian journey and was attempting a more
refined, almost Neo-classical manner for his small-scale works, whilst Strafford and Charles I
awaited their showing in the 1837 Salon. The portrait of Guizot (here illustrated in a reduced
version by Delaroche) suits the idiom, the half-figure profiled almost like a cameo against a
marble background distinctly reminiscent of the Roman architecture of the city of Nimes.3° In
contrast to Pastoret, Guizot wears a sober black jacket relieved only by the flash ofa ribbon on his
lapel, two narrow gold rings being the only vestige of further adornment. Yet the distinctive
Mediterranean physiognomy conveys a memorable intensity of inward cogitation, directed
towards a future which he, as a statesman, aspired to be able to control. In 1833, Ingres had com-
pleted the celebrated painting of Lowis-Francois Bertin (Louvre), the newspaper proprietor and
father of one of Delaroche’s fellow hermits at Camaldoli. If Ingres’s Bertin has often been held to
incarnate the triumph of the French bourgeoisie after the Revolution, Delaroche’s Guizot — the
portrait of ahistorian who believed firmly in the destiny of the “Third Estate’ — helps to restore to
that moment ofhistorical development its precarious, existential tone.
Delaroche’s image was widely diffused, in the form of a fine engraving by Calamatta, whose
marketability easily survived the fall of Louis-Philippe in 1848 and the exile of the minister so
intimately associated with his government.*’ The extent to which it acquired the force of a ca-
nonical portrayal of this emblematic figure of the July Monarchy is attested by Riffaut’s subse-
quent and less accomplished engraving, which perceptibly ages Guizot and lengthens the body
slightly, but is in most respects closely derived from Delaroche and Calamatta (illus. 97). This

97 Francois Guizot, engraving by Adolphe-Pierre Riffaut. Private collection.

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was the image for the encyclopedia, when Guizot’s political role had lost its prospective, exis-
tential character and been thoroughly historicized.
Delaroche chose a similarly restrained and classical composition for his portrait of Thiers,
though, according to Mirecourt, he took an inordinate amount of time to complete it; the
work was begun in the late months of 1837 and finished only in 1855, the year before Delaroche’s
death.3® Thiers was yet another of the political class that dominated mid-nineteenth century
France, an art critic and historian of distinction who reached the highest offices of state under
the Third Republic. He was also, like Guizot, of Protestant stock, and the patriarchal benevo-
lence of his persona conveys something of the pastor in Delaroche’s rendering. Certainly both
the Guizot and the Thiers portraits contrast vividly with another of the later portraits that De-
laborde singled out for praise, though its undoubted purpose is to be a private, rather than a
public image. Charles de Remusat, born in the same year as Delaroche himself, was a preco-
cious early recruit to the Doctrinaire connection in the Restoration, and a politician whose
fortunes extended, like those of Thiers, over the July Monarchy and the Third Republic. As
minister of the interior in 1840, he introduced the proposal to bring the ashes of Napoleon
back from Saint Helena, and as minister of foreign affairs in 1871 he negotiated peace after the
Franco-Prussian war with Bismarck. Remusat records in his Mémoires that he was frustrated in
his plan to appoint Delaroche to the post of Director of the French School at Rome by the op-
position of Louis-Philippe, but gained from his contact with the painter an enduring friend-
ship, which brought about in its turn the commissioning of the portrait.*”
Destined for his family, in whose hands it remained until recently, Delaroche’s portrait of
Remusat (illus. 77) is a charming study of a man who chooses precisely not to appear at the
tribune, or as future historians might wish to see him. His face 1s slightly averted, which gives
him a quizzical expression, and the hair curling round the temple is abundant and glossy
enough to flatter slightly a man who was then almost fifty years old. The crossed arms give an
air of informality to the half-figure presentation, but no less attention has been given to the
pearly delicacy of the left hand than to the half-smile on the oval, agreeable face.*° There is a
telling tribute to the success with which Delaroche had negotiated the claims of friendship
within the contract of portrait painting in the letter that Remusat’s wife addressed to him after
seeing it for the first time: “This is Charles in his good moments, when he is chatting and
enjoying himself — it is remarkable — but it is you who made it so, it is in your company that
he was — the whole thing becomes simple and that is why.’
Representation is never simple, we might retort, and the very notion of ‘likeness’ is mediated
(as Brilliant points out) through a series of social and semantic filters, which determine the ap-
plicability of such a criterion within precise historical parameters. But it is central to the
argument of this chapter that Delaroche has a transgressive and radical side, perhaps in spite
of himself, which is adequately assimilated in the large Salon paintings, but finds hardly less
significant, if indirect, expression in the minor genres and practices to which he committed
himself. Charles Blanc could not refrain from pointing out that the most Neo-classical
drawing by Delaroche that he could find, the so-called Genie captif, was not in the end an ac-
ceptable work of art because of Delaroche’s refusal to rise to the ‘conception of an ideal nature’.

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 PAU Di EAR, Care

\s he put it, Delaroche ‘liked to particularize, just where style implies that one should general-
ize’. In portraiture, this preference did not by any means always prevail over the concentrated
determination to create a public image, appropriate to the sitter’s social role. But, at one end of
the spectrum, there was a delight in ‘particularization’, which Delaroche could not resist indul-
ging, and which made the transition from the life study to the finished work of high art excep-
tionally hard to fulfil.
This point comes across with particular force in relation to the project for the mural decora-
tion of the Madeleine Church in Paris, on the strength of which Delaroche made his first visit to
Italy in 1834/35. His primary purpose was to study, along with his young friends and pupils, the
mural paintings of the early Renaissance — ‘/resques des trecentist’, as Delaborde termed them.*
But, just as Delacroix’s almost contemporary visit to North Africa surprised him with the
visible evidence of a culture that seemed to resurrect the classical Mediterranean crivilization
of Greece and Rome, so Delaroche seems to have been just as fascinated by the contemporary
Italians as by their predecessors as painted by Fra Angelico. That is to say, he collected portrait
images, with a view to using them in the Madeleine commission. But he was not completely
successful in making the transition from the particular to the ideal. There is a fine pencil
drawing of aman in peasant clothing, which may well date from this visit (illus. 98). It shows
great ability to convey varied textures and create striking chiaroscuro effects with the simple
medium, while retaining the fresh immediacy of the holiday sketch-book. It is possible that
Delaroche used the same drawing, and perhaps other renderings of the same model, in the pre-
paration of one of the few oil studies that survived the collapse of the Madeleine project, An
Apostle (illus. 99). Bearing a dedication to his friend the Duc de Feltre, and dated ‘Rome 1835’,
this fragment from the wreckage suggests that Delaroche had been looking at Michelangelo’s
ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, and experimenting with the kind of strongly accented
colour contrasts that would show up in the remote cu/-de-lampe regions of the Madeleine.*+
But, despite the coal-black hair of the apostle and the outline of the white robe against the
warm brown colouring of the balcony on which he leans, the oil sketch seems to promise little
of substance to take the place of the ragged charm of the drawing.
Where Delaroche undoubtedly did spend a considerable time sketching, with a view to uti-
lizing the studies in his Madeleine designs, was at the monastery and hermitage of Camaldoli
where he spent most of the summer and early autumn of 1834. Indeed, this remarkable series of
portrait sketches, most of which also entered the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts at
Nantes by way of the Feltre collection, stands out as a vivid and appropriate record of this
turning-point of Delaroche’s career. The technique of the oil sketch as a way of recording in-
dividual features that would be subsumed in a larger composition was a well-known device of
the school of David. But Delaroche has given the faces ofthese Camaldoline monks an intensity
of characterization, which, at the same time, seems to be incapable of being taken any further; it
is as if the functional differentiation of the young and the old, the prior and the oblate, were
subsumed in a total self-sufficiency — the outward sign of their existence, for each other, as
members of the community. The only significant precedent, perhaps, is Granet’s series of
paintings of the Choir of the Capuchin Church Rome (1819 Salon version; National Museum of

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 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

98 Study ofa man inpeasant clothing, c. 1834, pencil drawing.

Ane

ve Jie 2 Filtes

(jal Seias lower

Rane &y¥s
fei
 PAU Le DE LAR OIGH EH

1o1 Tivo Monks (Dom Michele Rigogh and Dom Vincenzo Frilli), 1834, oil on panel.
 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

102 Head of aMonk, 1834, oil on panel.

Wales, Cardiff). Granet has, of course, used the effects of perspective and backlighting to indi-
vidualize the features of the monks within the spectacle of ashared ritual, on which the specta-
tor eavesdrops without being able to participate. Delaroche does no such thing. But his
consistent way of combining the meticulous detail of the tonsure with the overall glow of light
on the skin serves to establish these figures in a space that is at the same time palpable and in-
accessible. On the other hand, in all but one case, he leads the gaze away from us, fixing it on a
far point or burying it in the interior space of devotion.
The one figure who catches our glance is Dom Tommaso Formigli, prior of the monastery of
Camaldoli, who shares his picture with Dom Romualdo Giani, described in the Chapter roll as
 PAUL DELAROCHE

occupied in forestry (illus. 100). The other double portrait shows Dom Michele Rigogli, whom
Halévy identifies as the former victim of a famous incident involving brigands, and another
elderly monk, Dom Vincenzo Frilli, whose job as camerlingo would no doubt have obliged him
to provide rooms for the French visitors (illus. 101).*? Of the two individual portraits, the
younger man represented may well be an oblate, not yet admitted to full vows, such as
Domenico Pelucchini, while the older of the two, with a substantial grizzled beard, may be
one of the monks involved in the running of the Eremo (hermitage), several kilometres up in
the Apennines, such as Isidoro Vannucci (illus. oz). Apart from the first double portrait invol-
ving the prior, the names of the sitters are not written on the sketches. But the vivid quality with
which Delaroche has succeeded in imbuing these tonsured heads, as they emerge from their
white robes and from the white ground of the canvas, seems to provoke us to the task of filling
in the names. So fully realized an individuality, in pictorial terms, must be completed by the
addition of a historically verifiable label.
Yet one could argue simultaneously that these images, ‘of an extraordinary clarity of expres-
sion’, as a writer in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts later phrased it,*° have been caught up in a
process of social and personal exchange, which already eludes the concept of property and pro-
priety associated with the tradition of the portrait. Were these indeed sketches done with a view
to the Madeleine commission? In general terms, the explanation fits, though such images with
all the immediacy of the pencil sketch (illus. 98) and none of the congealed quality of the Apostle
(illus. gg) could hardly have been pressed into direct service for the remote and badly lit upper
regions of the Madeleine. There is one indication that Delaroche considered them as, in some
sense, already the property of the monks who had sat for him: the double portrait of Rigogli and
Frilli has a dedication, below Rigogli’s portrait: ‘Au tres excellent Professeur Mr de La Roche’,
which seems to have been written, in a shaky hand, by the elderly man, using one of the pencils
that Delaroche employed to trace the fringe of his white beard and the contour of his shoulder
(illus. 101). Delaroche was indeed, for these monks, the professor of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,
instructing his young companions, and not the Salon painter of Cromiell and Jane Grey. He
was also, at least by virtue of his intention, the artist methodically putting together a dossier
of sketches, which would allow him to change direction and crown his early career with a
major work on a grand and public scale. But the ultimate failure of that great plan left, as the
most substantial legacy of Delaroche’s first visit to Italy, this group of portrait sketches of Ca-
maldoline monks, which had been enabled to develop their own special rationale irrespective of
further intentions: as indices of atime of meditation and instruction, far from Paris and indeed
from Rome, which belonged nowhere in terms of the accepted hierarchy of pictorial genres, but
whose irreducible appeal could be preserved by their being simply transferred to the collection
ofa friend.

There is a revealing anecdote, which testifies not only to Delacroix’s general irritation with the
popularity of Delaroche’s work, but also to the particular features that he found most reprehen-
sible. Though this has been taken at face value by Zerner and Rosen, it deserves a little more

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critical attention, and for that reason needs to be quoted. Delacroix’s remarks are reported by
‘Theodore Silvestre:

‘I can’t hear his name without thinking of the following story, which happened in Russia to my uncle
Riesener:
‘An opulent and important person had asked him to come to his home and paint his wife’s portrait.
The work being well advanced, our boyar, rather pleased, went to fetch a cage and said to the painter:
“Very nice, very nice; but ifon my wife’s hand you would set this canary that she is fond of, it would be
parece: ay.
“Possibly,” said Riesener, laughing to himself.
“Also,” added the husband, “ifinMadame’s other hand you would put this lump of sugar in order to
excite the bird, wouldn’t the portrait be even more expressive? But it would also be necessary to make it
clear that the canary prefers his mistress to the lump of sugar.”
‘Well, concluded Delacroix, that boyar is the exact likeness of Paul Delaroche in search of thought
and expression.”

Doubtless the subtext of this little story is a certain resentment at the lavish patronage which
Delaroche had succeeded in gaining in the 1830s from foreign noblemen whose taste was not
up to the level of their considerable fortunes (so Delacroix might have thought): the Russian
Count Anatole Demidoff was, after all, the epitome of such patrons. A more substantial point
to be made is the admittedly obvious one that Delacroix is not, in this judgement, actually re-
ferring to Delaroche’s portraiture. As we have seen, the tendency of Delaroche’s work in this
genre was precisely to cut down all extraneous elements in the interests ofan instantly memo-
rable type, whether with a historical figure such as Cromwell or a contemporary statesman such
as Guizot. Even where he accepted a commission, from Demidoff precisely, to complete a large
historical portrait of the Russian Czar Peter the Great, to whom the Demidoff family owed the
origins of their great wealth, his conception was disciplined by the habitual requirements of the
genre: archaeological detail, as in the Cross and Sash of the Order of Saint Andrew, and inci-
dental reference to the Demidoff family in the form of the cannon testifying to their role as iron-
founders, are subsumed in the overall effect. The drawn sword that dramatically slices the fore-
ground space is an index of temporal immediacy not unlike the gleaming straw at the front of
Jane Grey, exhibited a few years before (illus. 78),
However, Delacroix’s story of the sentimental boyar is significant because it neatly encap-
sulates the claim that has been made, from his own day up to the present, that Delaroche in-
troduces anecdote, or the tyranny of the ‘subject’ (to use Leon Rosenthal’s term) into the
structure of the work of art, in such a way as to negate its painterly effect. The exquisite equi-
vocation of the putative canary is used as an exemplar of the quest that Delaroche will oblige
us to undertake, let us say, from the apprehensive, peaked face of a little prince to the alert
posture of a little spaniel who really loves his master but is distracted by the sinister footfall
picked up by his clever little ears. The answer to this claim, however, should surely be not to
endorse it mindlessly, or to attempt to dismiss it, but to appreciate why Delaroche’s search for
‘thought and expression’ took this particular form, and where it eventually led him in his
practice as a painter. Preoccupation with the ‘subject’, in the way that Delacroix characterizes

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 PAU Te sD AVRS OlGa Es

it, is after all an aspect of a pictorial system which Delaroche was in the process of transform-
ing, through his middle years, with the effect that his format became, in several notable in-
stances, ‘panoramic’. The relays that he set up in narrative terms, in such a work as Princes in
the Tower, need to be understood in relation to the more extensive transformations to which he
was subjecting both format and narrative structure in the smaller cabinet paintings he
produced simultaneously.
Having already claimed that the relation between ‘off and ‘on’ space in a work such as the
Princes in the Tower is the result of a semiotic process of development drawing on prior pictorial
types such as the Annunciation, I hardly need to stress this point. However this is perhaps the
stage at which a provisional answer can be given to the often repeated claim, closely related to
Delacroix’s criticism, that Delaroche is not so much pictorial as theatrical in his devices: a claim
which was perpetuated in the assertion, made by both Dumas and Gautier, that he was the
Casimir Delavigne of painting.*? It is probable that this comparison had its first public airing
after Delavigne dedicated his play Les Enfants d’Edouard to ‘my friend Paul Delaroche’; when
the play was published in Delavigne’s Complete Works in 1846, 1t was accompanied by a
‘critical examination’ which ended precisely with an allusion to the concept on which analogies
between the visual arts and the literary arts had been based since classical times: wt pictura
poesis.°°
The way in which Delavigne has acknowledged the precedence of Delaroche’s painting in
the very structure of the play is, however, instructive, since it brings into focus the limited
utility of the traditional analogical criticism. Perhaps Delavigne’s major innovation, with
regard to Shakespeare’s Richard III, is to build up the character of Tyrrel, and to show him
gaining the confidence of the young princes, who still believe almost to the last moment that
they will be rescued from the Tower. In a sublime anachronism (of which he is completely
aware) Delavigne has the sound of ‘God save the King!’ ring out off stage, and the princes col-
lapsing into each other’s arms, only to have their hopes dashed by the entry of the Duke of
Gloucester. The stage directions read: “The door opens whilst they remain embraced’. A
signal comes from Gloucester, and Dighton and Forrest ‘run towards the children, who fall
back on the bed uttering a horrible cry.>' The play is then concluded.
What will be apparent from this, rather tortuous piece of theatrical denouement is, first of
all, the pertinence of Lessing’s views on the radical difference between the arts of space and the
arts of time, as developed in Laocoon.>* Delavigne feels impelled to construct a melodramatic
sequence of emotionally charged events, culminating in a ‘horrible cry’, where Delaroche is
content with the frozen moment of anticipation. It would be tempting to conclude from this
revealing comparison that the whole practice of making analogies between painting and
theatre, as in Delaroche’s case, is based on confusion and sloppy thinking. But the truth of the
issue is surely more complicated. Stendhal had already pointed out, in his review of the Salon of
1824, that there were innumerable examples of bad painters imitating the figure of the great
tragic actor Talma, who miscalculated the banal effect of transferring his well-known gestures
to the new medium. “Talma performing these gestures, which on scene last only a second, would
be superb; these people, in perpetuating the fugitive gestures of Talma, seem merely histrio-

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 PIO RRA TDS) DON PANO URTAUMCA'S

nic.’*s But Stendhal, as we have seen, chose to regard the work of Guérin as a litmus paper for
the new Romantic sensibility; in singling out the face of Phaedra from the overall configuration
of Phaedra and Fippolytus, he was after all praising a work whose essential point of reference was
Racine’s tragedy, Phedre. We have to reckon, in other words, with a distinction between what
Stendhal slightingly calls ‘the copy of an imitation’, in the case of the second-rate Talma
fanciers, and a more positive way of incorporating theatrical reference into pictorial work,
which respects the intrinsic properties of the medium.
Hubert Damisch has argued stringently about this particular issue in a very different context,
which may however help to clarify the distinction which is being made. In discussing the sig-
nificance of the three mysterious Renaissance panel paintings, which have been related to ‘Ideal
Cities’, he considers Richard Krautheimer’s bold hypothesis that two of these works represent
in effect ‘the tragic and the comic scene’: that is to say, they should be regarded not as autono-
mous paintings, but as designs for the stage.*+ Damisch’s conclusion, the detail of which cannot
be reproduced here, is that the panel paintings showing architectural perspectives (and indeed
so many works from the same period, such as the grand processional pieces of Gentile Bellini
and Carpaccio) are not any the less paintings because they put on scene the process of represen-
tation. ‘It is not because [painting] offers itself openly for a representation, indeed for the repre-
sentation ofa representation, that we should necessarily look for its model, occasion or pretext, in a
reality which would itself be in the order of the spectacle.’
Damisch’s point can be reiterated, at appropriate junctures in the further historical develop-
ment of painting, where the artist’s stategy is precisely to create a ‘representation of a represen-
tation’. For instance, Svetlana Alpers has convincingly argued that the Dutch seventeenth-
century artist Gerard Ter Borch conceives his work not as traditional genre painting, but as
the representation of scenes already distanced from any reference to ‘real life’ by their status as
tableaux vivants, which has obvious consequences for any attempt at moralistic interpretation.*°
Coming back to Delaroche’s own century, Michael Fried has pointed out (as has already been
mentioned) the relevance of the notion of the ‘theatrical’, not as an aberration from the devel-
opment of painting but as a necessary stage to be traversed by the artist, so that it makes sense to
consider ‘the role of the dynamic of posing in Manet’s art’.*’ All of these arguments add up to a
case which is, in my view, irrefutable and has a special relevance to the issue of theatricality as it
has been unthinkingly employed in the discussion of Delaroche’s work. There is no a prior
reason why an involvement with the theatre, and a close personal contact with actors and play-
wrights, should be viewed as detrimental to a painter’s work. It remains to be shown in what
sense, if at all, the elements of ‘theatricality’ are integrated in the development of the particular
medium.
In Delaroche’s case, there is a complication which needs to be considered at the outset: this is
the precise extent of Delaroche’s actual involvement with the Romantic theatre, of which
Casimir Delavigne was a notable protagonist. There are several indications that he was
involved in costume and stage designs, both for plays by Delavigne such as Marino Faliero
(1834) and for contemporary ballets such as La Tentation (1832), in which his friends Eugene
Lami and Edouard Bertin were also employed in preparing maquettes. Considering Delaroche’s

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O GigE

well-attested method of working with small-scale models as a preparation for his large paint-
ings, there is no reason to doubt these reports. But a serious doubt does exist in relation to the
most significant claim, which is that Delaroche designed the costumes for Alexandre Dumas’s
Henri [IT et sa cour, whose first performance in 1829 has been hailed as the opening clarion call of
French Romantic drama, one year before Victor Hugo’s more celebrated Ernani. The evidence
for this claim comes from the personal testimony of a costume designer for the Paris Opera,
who began his own career only in 1836 and was a very old man when he offered the informa-
tion.®’ It is rendered doubtful in part by the fact that Alexandre Dumas himself, who provides
such a vivid account of Delaroche’s life and achievements, makes no mention of such an assign-
ment.
The issue crystallizes around a drawing, signed by Delaroche, which was in the possession of
the actress and sociétaire of the Comédie Francaise, Mademoiselle Anais, in 1836, and clearly
dates from the few years preceding (illus. 79).°? At first sight, this appears to be a costume
design. But on further inspection the image is less straightforward. The sixteenth-century
costume is indeed sketched meticulously, with close attention to the interweaving of belts,
buttons and chains as well as to the hang of the cape. But there is no colour, and hence no in-
dication of the general effect of the costume, from a theatrical point of view. On the other hand,
the face is intensely characterized, with close attention to the dark, curly hair, which 1s set off by
a patch of orange pastel. The contrast with a genuine costume design of the period is well made
if we compare Delaroche’s drawing with one of the vigorous wash sketches which Delacroix
prepared for Hugo’s Amy Robsart (1827).°° Naturally enough, Delacroix concentrates on the
swaggering effect of the multi-coloured costume, and makes no attempt to portray the charac-
ter’s features in an accurate fashion. Delaroche seems to have got the balance completely wrong
— but only if we make the assumption that this was a design for a costume.
In effect, the drawing should be seen in the light of Delaroche’s attested interest in portraying
the actor in his or her role: that is to say, in a form of portraiture that combines both the stage
persona and the person adopting it. (In Brilliant’s terms, the question ‘What do I look like?’, and
even ‘What am I like?’, appears at the same time as the interrogation of the role ‘Who am I?’) At
the Salon of 1831, Delaroche exhibited a now-destroyed portrait of Mademoiselle Sontag as
Donna Anna, which showed the German-born soprano in the role from Mozart’s Don
Giovanni for which she had been acclaimed in 1828. By the stage at which Delaroche painted
the portrait, however, the singer had temporarily retired from the stage, having decided to
marry a Sardinian diplomat, Count Rossi. The public presentation of the portrait, in this
case, was not intended simply to stress her role as an actress, but, on the contrary, to draw atten-
tion to the newly-fledged lady of fashion who had succeeded the woman of equivocal, if not
doubtful, reputation.
The Delaroche drawing under discussion may possibly be a similar sketch for a portrait ofan
actor in a recent role, which was not taken any further. It bears a striking similarity, as regards
the general pose and the physiognomy of the actor, to the print of Firmin in the role of Saint-
Mesgrin, which was published after the first performance of Dumas’s Henri III et sa cour (illus.
103). Indeed, it could be argued that Delaroche’s drawing, far from being a sketch for the rather

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 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

; R 6¢3
Cortunie de FIRMIN, role de SATINT-MESGIUN,
dans Herre (lob ine =
A Prema

Uslro Mapreke ne voile pus yen

Rerchvun dp nentirarc.,

sof!

103 Firmin as ‘Saint-Mesgrin’ in Dumas’s Henri [I]

et sa cour, 1829, engraving by Maleuvre.

comical and risque version of sixteenth-century dress that poor Firmin has had to adopt, con-
stitutes a kind of critique — perhaps of the print itself, in the first place, but also of the generally
incorrect status of historical references in the costume design of the early Romantic theatre in
France. Firmin himself was an important actor of these times, who succeeded after Talma’s
death in 1826 to some of the major male roles at the Comedie Frangaise and took the title role
at the first performance of Hernani in 1830."" It is possible that Delaroche intended to paint
Firmin as Saint-Mesgrin at roughly the same time as he painted Mademoiselle Sontag as Donna
Anna, and that Firmin was given the sketch, which he later handed on to his fellow sociétaire
Mademoiselle Anais. Or — if my earlier hypothesis about Anais’s modelling for Delaroche 1s
correct — it is possible that Delaroche gave it directly to her, signing it as he did with the more
intimate ‘Paul D”. In any event, the conclusion must be that the work was not a costume design,
in any relevant sense of the term, but an essay both in historical reconstruction of sixteenth-
century court dress, and in portraiture considered as a complex transaction between reality
and the playing of roles.
The response to the accusation that Delaroche’s work was theatrical, in the wt pictura poesis
tradition, must therefore be an unequivocal one. Delaroche’s close acquaintance with the
Romantic drama and his involvement in the preparatory stages of a number of productions
did not prevent him from assessing precisely what, in the matter of role-playing and ‘posing’,

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could be put to use in the second-order representation of his own art. This, of course, applies in
general terms to the large Salon paintings that were considered in the previous chapter. The fact
that Jane Grey, for example, inspired the closing tableau vivant at the end of Nus and Brot’s play
of the same name, which opened in the year of Delaroche’s death — not to mention the
waxworks of the Execution of Mary Queen ofScots inaugurated by Madame Tussaud 1n 1891 —
must say a great deal about the persistence of Delaroche’s image in nineteenth-century visual
culture.°” But it says little or nothing about the propriety of Delaroche’s compositional strate-
gies in the context of the history of painting. However, the particular group of works in which
the strictly pictorial dividend of Delaroche’s procedure becomes most evident is not the
majestic series of large Salon paintings but the smaller series of cabinet paintings that ran
parallel to them: Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin and the Assassination of the Duc de Guise.
It is in these works that we can see most vividly the way in which Delaroche’s treatment of the
‘subject’ involves a radical transformation in the reading of pictorial space.
Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin were exhibited together at the Salon of 1831, with
Princes in the Tower and Crommell. Their status was, however, different from the large-scale
works, inasmuch as they had already been purchased for the cabinet of the Comte de Pour-
tales-Gorgier, who paid a modest price for them and was later to reject an offer eight times as
large.°3 Public and critical response to the pair of works was immensely enthusiastic, though it
was remarked that the second and later painting lacked the freshness and spontaneity of the
first. Later judgements on Delaroche’s career confirmed the justice of this positive response,
by invariably including these two works, and the slightly later Assassination of the Duc de Guise,
among his most memorable achievements. Delaborde, who had harsh words to say about the
immediately prior Death of Elizabeth, saluted the ‘tact’ and ‘finesse’ of this modulation to a
smaller scale, while Gautier conceded that ‘this kind of subject was a natural outlet for Dela-
roche’s talent’.°* Mirecourt, itemizing the early paintings, qualified Cardinal Richeheu and
Cardinal Mazarin, with Cromiell, as his ‘masterpieces’, while Alexandre Dumas, retaining a
sentimental affection for the Jacobite fantasy of 1825, claimed: ‘Cing-Mars [1.e. Cardinal Riche-
lieu| and Miss Macdonald, this was enough to make Delaroche a great painter?”>
These responses, of course, tell us little or nothing about what it was that appealed to Dela-
roche’s audience, at the time of the Salon and subsequently. As had become his custom with
earlier works, Delaroche had used the Salon catalogue to anchor his images in the historical
text. Cardinal Richelieu was accompanied by a citation from Voltaire’s Essais sur les moeurs,
which described one of the last tyrannical acts of the all-powerful minister:

Cardinal Richelieu, worn out by the sickness which led him to the tomb, reascends the Rhone from
Tarascon to Lyon, trailing after him, in a boat attached to his own, Cinq-Mars and de Thou whom
he wishes himself to conduct to Lyon to have them beheaded.°°

The paired quotation, relating to the death of Richelieu’s no less powerful successor as minister
to the kings of France, comes from the Memoirs of Brienne:

In the midst of anumerous and brilliant circle of great lords and court ladies, Mazarin has one of his
nieces to show him the cards, and she keeps them for him at a gaming table placed close to his bed. 67

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 PORTRAITS PTO PANORAMAS

Quite evidently, there is material here for a pair of pendant pictures, corresponding to the dif-
ferent circumstances of the deaths of these two supremely political and worldly princes of the
Church. One can judge the appeal, for Delaroche and for his public, of the simple but compel-
ling binary oppositions suggested in the fragmentary texts: youth versus age, and the scene of
pageantry and doom in the open air against the hothouse conditions of the sick-room, which is
also a place of fashionable resort. But one can also envisage, even from this schematic opposi-
tion, the problems, on a pictorial level, that Delaroche had to encounter in tackling this promis-
ing double subject. In the first place, how could the artist make a composition out of one boat
towing another? In the second place, how could the Mazarin subject yield a contrast, in narra-
tive and pictorial terms, so striking and emotionally powerful as to match up to the devastating
confrontation of youth and age in Richelieu? To put the issue in this way is perhaps to assume
too great an insight into Delaroche’s way of working. But, in general terms, I believe that it is
right to acknowledge that he achieved his most innovatory effects as a result of the insistent
formal demands that arose in the working through of his chosen subject-matter. We know
that the Princes in the Tower progressed from a composition en hauteur (like the Northcote
print) to a wide format in the course of such working, and the decision to add additional
canvas made it possible to incorporate the ominous door. In the case of Cardinal Richelieu, I
would suggest, it was the very problem of providing an adequate format for the binary contrasts
implicit in the subject-matter that led him, for the first time, to attempt what was in effect a
panoramic mode (illus. 71).
This begs the question: how would Delaroche’s interest have been aroused in the first place,
in the implacable Richelieu’s public triumph over Cing-Mars and de’Thou? The answer is cer-
tainly not in Voltaire’s text, but in the first French historical novel to emulate the techniques of
Sir Walter Scott, Alfred de Vigny’s Cing-Mars, which had been published in 1826. Whether
Delaroche knew Vigny personally at this stage is hard to ascertain. He certainly counted him
as a friend by 1834, when he wrote to him asking for a frank opinion on Jane Grey while it was
still in the studio.°* Vigny’s political and social position was a highly individual one, since he
combined a powerful nostalgia for the lost wealth and status of his own aristocratic family
with a radical approach to the civil and religious issues of modern society.°? Delaroche
probably attached much less importance than Vigny to the historical thesis, associated with
Montesquieu, that the French state had been destroyed by the continued and systematic perse-
cution of the nobility carried out by the monarchy through instruments of royal power such as
the two cardinals. He would have been unlikely to see in the two victims, Cinq-Mars and de
Thou, exemplars of the military aristocracy and the noblesse de robe respectively, in the way that
the partisans of this thesis, such as Vigny himself, were liable to do. But there is good reason to
argue that Delaroche was more and more responsive, as time went on, to the general character
of Vigny’s thought. In 1833, the year before the correspondence over Jane Grey, Vigny had ac-
knowledged to himself the continuing theme of martyrdom in his historical fiction: Cimg—Mars
had turned out to be an episode in his History of the Greatness and the Martyrdom of the Nobility of
France.7°
Delaroche thus had more than the dry commentary of Voltaire to engage him in the story of

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 PAUL DELAROCHE

Cing-Mars. He had Vigny’s romantic novel, which faithfully followed the ascent to power of
the young favourite of Louis XIII, and his struggle for power with Richelieu, which finally
resulted not only in his own downfall but in the condemnation of his more sober friend, de
Thou. He had Vigny’s evocative description of the final journey upstream, when Richelieu,

_ as if to prolong that pleasure in vengeance which men have dared to call that of the gods . . . re-
ascended the river slowly in rowing barges gilded and festooned with his coat of arms and his colours,
aie. ; : ; Sie : ees
lying in the first of them, and dragging his two victims in the second, at the end of a long chain.’

Yet Vigny’s description instantly calls to mind the main problem that Delaroche had to en-
counter in recording the episode: the ‘long chain’, which so poetically serves Vigny’s purpose,
would be anomalous, if not ridiculous, in visual terms. Unlike its pendant, Cardinal Richelieu
seems to have left behind no preliminary drawings, the only exception being a highly finished
watercolour study, which differs from the final painting only in details (such as the much
choppier water conditions).’* Both this study and the painting, therefore, indicate Delaroche’s
pictorial solution to the problem of the two barges, which is to represent them almost in
parallel, with no ‘chain’ visible, but the colour notations of Vigny offering a code for the visual
liaison which will unify the different areas of the painting (illus. 71). Heine entirely understood
this achievement, and his descriptive interpretation is surely an exact account of the way in
which Delaroche’s flooding colour unifies the scene, at the same time opening up the possibility
of figural and allegorical meaning:

The conception of the boats which thus follow one another is indeed inartistic, but it is here treated
with great skill. The colour is brilliant, almost dazzling, and the figures seem to swim in the golden
purple of the setting sun. This splendour contrasts strangely with the fate impending over the three
leading figures. The two blooming youths are being taken to execution, and that by a dying old man.
Gaily adorned as these boats may be, they row into the shadowy realm of death. The glorious, golden
gleaming of the sun is but a signal that he must be gone. ’Tis evening, and ere long he must descend,
leaving a blood-red strip along the earth, and it and all things vanish in the night!7>

Nothing in Vigny’s novel suggests that the convoy passed on its way under the setting sun.
Indeed, Delaroche may be said to have conflated the description of the journey already quoted
(itself based on a contemporary account) with an iterative passage, immediately following, in
which Richelieu and his victims are said to rest in the evenings, ‘when the heat had passed.’”*
However, Delaroche’s particular achievement in Cardinal Richelieu has been to combine his
taste for archaeological and topographic detail — and indeed his lessons from studio practice —
with an overall effect of dramatic lighting, which prompts the kind of poetic connections devel-
oped in Heine’s account. The banner displaying Richelieu’s coat of arms is there, and the gor-
geously dressed young favourite receiving the attention of the black-robed de Thou is just one
ofaseries of carefully detailed studies in period dress; the stalwart sailors, by contrast, flank the
period decor with gestures that recall the life studies after the model conducted in the studio of
Gros.’* Delaroche has been attentive to the locale described by Vigny, evoking in the back-
ground the banks of the Rhone with the gleaming tower of Tarascon on the extreme right.
But the success of the painting depends on the pictorial extrapolation, from ‘gilded’ barges to

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 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

104 Study for Cardinal Mazarin, c. 1830, watercolour with gum varnish.

‘golden’ sun, which ensures (as Heine recognized) our tolerance of the ‘inartistic’ binary
division.
The transition from Cardinal Richelieu, dated 1829, to Cardinal Mazarin, dated the following
year, is significant on a number of different levels (illus. 73). Chronologically, we move from the
reign of Louis XIII to that of Louis XIV, generically from a landscape to an interior, and in
tone, as was remarked by contemporary critics, from the tragedy of Cinqg-Mars and de Thou
to something more resembling a comic scene.”° Ziff has also suggested that a comparison
between the two works indicates ‘a significant shift in Delaroche’s art. The former ‘is
composed of a lively, if inharmonious, medley of pinks, oranges, reds, browns and greens’,
while the latter is ‘refined and delicate’, showing ‘no signs of brushwork’.’”” All these points are
valid, and Ziff is entirely right to see the pair of works as being situated on the cusp, so to speak,
between the bravura of Death of Elizabeth and the sobriety of Princes in the Tower. But we must
beware of implying too neat a symmetry between the two paintings, as if Delaroche simply en-
visaged Cardinal Mazarin as a pendant to its predecessor. In effect, Cardinal Mazarin, whose
overall proportions differ (if only slightly) from Cardinal Richelieu, should be seen as a logically
consequent stage in Delaroche’s exploration of the panoramic format and, by this test, a com-
parative failure, which was to lead to a much greater measure of success at his next attempt.
Compared with its predecessor, Cardinal Mazarin offers a larger range of preparatory
sketches, which show the composition in the process of being elaborated. Nicolas Milovanovic
has cited and illustrated a number of rough drawings, most of them in a private collection,
. . - .- ~ . . . . - 78

which show individual figures and groupings being jotted down in a rapid shorthand.” One

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 PAUL DELAR OG E

of them includes a small version of the overall composition, which is further developed in the
exquisite glazed wash drawing held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes (illus. 104). This little
work is so ravishing, with its transparent light colours and its calligraphic fluency reminiscent of
the Rousseau drawings of 1825, that it successfully disguises the real flaws in its composition,
compared with the finished painting. Although the general configuration of the space is already
fixed, with the Cardinal’s bed and its flanking screen providing an oblique axis to which the
remaining elements all relate, there is too symmetrical a division between the left and right
zones of the picture. The chandelier indeed cuts the space exactly in half, and the siting of the
ambassadorial figure just below removes any sense of narrative tension from the right-hand
side, where the most prominent feature is nothing more than an empty chair.
I have deliberately referred to the figure at the centre of the Nantes sketch as an ‘ambassador-
ial figure’ in order to recall the earlier discussion of the pictorial and extra-pictorial role of the
ambassador in a succession of works leading back, through Delaroche and Bonington, to
Revoil’s Henry IVPlaying mith his Children (illus. 45). But there can be no doubt that this
figure, or more exactly the much more substantial black-robed figure who takes his place in
the final painting, is an ambassador in the strictest sense as well: an annotation in Delaroche’s
hand on one of the drawings featured by Milovanovic identifies the Spanish ambassador, and
the red cross of the Order of Santiago prominently displayed on his robe confirms the fact. But
here the difficulty which Delaroche had in resolving the problems posed by this picture comes
clearly into focus. Nowhere in the laconic extract published in the Salon catalogue does Dela-
roche hint that the dying Cardinal 1s receiving the Spanish ambassador. The mention is only of
the niece displaying her uncle’s cards to him, which can be traced through the whole series of
sketches. Was Delaroche uncertain about the extent of the information that needed to be made
public in the elucidation of the picture? Did he expect that the public and the critics would take
the trouble to find out for themselves?
These questions are to some extent answered — or revealed as inapplicable — by the critical
comments of Heine, who was hardly less effusive about Cardinal Mazarin than about its prede-
cessor. Heine is content to accept the work as a memento mori, in the general sense: ‘He lies in a
splendid bed of state, amid a splendid surrounding of gay courtiers and domestics, who gossip,
play cards and stroll about the hall, all people in sparkling, shifting colours, useless, superficial
creatures, especially useless for a dying man”? Apart from this, Heine is especially attentive to
the nuances of coiffure and clothing, which he seems to consider remarkably historically
accurate: “The hair of the men flows in natural curls upon their shoulders, the ladies wear the
witty frisure a la Sévigné. The dress of the latter indicates, however, a transition to the long
trailing skirts and wide-bagging tastelessness of the later time. This is indeed a connoisseur’s
reaction, and Heine seems content to regard the Spanish Ambassador simply as ‘a noble
courtier in a dark violet velvet dress with a red cross’, and even Mazarin’s niece as no more
than ‘the lady who is playing near by’ (illus. 73).°°
It was reasonably appropriate for Delaroche’s careful study of period costume to be acknowl-
edged in this way. The success of the painting at the Salon, among the better-informed critics
such as Heine, could indeed be justified almost exclusively in such terms, though the political

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 POOR
ReaD iS) lO) SPZASINT@OIRSAUNICASS

105 Interior Scene (Possibly with Cardinal Mazarin), c. 1830, watercolour.

point that Delaroche had ‘summarized in two paintings the long struggle of the French aristoc-
racy against the establishment of absolute power’ was also sustained — rather mystifyingly, as
regards Cardinal Mazarin — by Delaroche’s friend Horace de Viel-Castel.*' The figure of the
Spanish ambassador, however, cannot be written out of the plot with impunity. For in giving
him such prominence, Delaroche has undoubtedly signalled a subsidiary narrative, which can
be detected in the development of the composition. Mazarin’s final illness and death took place
shortly after he had achieved the diplomatic coup of marrying the young Louis XIV to the
Infanta Maria-Theresa of Spain and thereby securing the Spanish alliance. He did so,
however, at the expense of his own elder niece, Marie Mancini, who was the object of the
young Louis’s ardent attentions and had to be sent away from court to avoid complicating the
diplomatic triumph. It is hard to resist Milovanovic’s conclusion that the young woman in the
extreme right-hand group, who turns wistfully towards the ambassador, is intended to portray
Marie Mancini, and the documentary evidence that he supplies from contemporary portraits
also gives support to the hypothesis that the other woman in the group 1s another court lady, at
one point involved with the young king: Mademoiselle de Montpensier, known as La Grande
Mademoiselle.”” Delaroche seems in fact to have contemplated another composition bearing on
the sad exile of Marie Mancini, since a highly finished watercolour in the Victoria and Albert
Museum shows the same two women seated at a table, while the elderly Mazarin gives instruc-
tions to a pair of gentlemen — perhaps charging them to conduct the inconvenient niece to the
faraway port of Brouage (illus. 105).

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 PAU Di da7As hiO1GaEne:

This composition, seemingly dated 1830, attests yet again to Delaroche’s habit of following
up his major works with sequential narratives, presumably as studies for large-scale paintings
referring to the same theme. But it also renders even more puzzling the excision of the plot
relating to the Spanish ambassador from the public presentation of Cardinal Mazarin: one
might argue that Mazarin’s action in relegating his elder niece’s marriage prospects 1n the inter-
ests of the state is a much more appropriate follow-up to Richelieu’s victimization of the young
Cing-Mars than the side-show involving the card game of his younger niece. However Dela-
roche may have judged that the foregrounding of this additional narrative would, from the
spectator’s point of view, have brought out potential weaknesses in the structure of the compo-
sition. The composition of Cardinal Richelieu works well because the dying cardinal constitutes
(in Fried’s terms) an ‘absorptive’ focus; he is not looking at his victims, and, after we ourselves
have done so, our attention is always drawn back to the highlighted, ascetic face. But to draw
attention to the relay that leads from the bowing ambassador to the wistful niece and her tem-
porarily distracted companion is to set up a sequence that finds no resolution in the face of
Mazarin: he cou/d look towards the ambassador, but he chooses to be distracted by the game
of cards. Delaroche’s decision to revise the placing of the ambassador has given a stronger nar-
rative connection to the right-hand group, if we accept Milovanovic’s interpretation. But it has
left his interaction with the cardinal and the card-players visually unclear. Perhaps it was partly
to pursue this problem that Delaroche produced the watercolour sketch, where the logic of con-
nection between the participants reads off in a more coherent fashion from the left to the right.
This discussion recalls all too vividly the clever critique of Delaroche’s work offered by De-
lacroix, which has already been quoted. There can be no disputing the fact that Delaroche did
attempt to integrate his compositions through a network of glances, and a system of physical
conjunctions, these being predicated upon the possibility of reading a coherent narrative into
the work, often with the aid of textual references supplied by the Salon catalogue. As Delacroix
rightly implied, these compositional elements could not make up for the technical deficiencies
in the painter’s craft, and he himself proved more than ready to relinquish any such ground-
work in the interests of brilliant painterly effects.*3 Delaroche, by any standards a far less
gifted painter, was of course vulnerable to Delacroix’s objections, particularly when (as with
the boyar’s wife’s canary) he set up a sequence of interpretive relays which tended to trivialize
rather than enhance the ‘subject’ of the picture. But Delacroix is wrong if he implies that Dela-
roche was unable to resolve this problem. In effect, the painting that follows on from the Car-
dinals, chronologically and in terms of format, can be seen as a remarkable solution to the
problems that had been foregrounded, but not by any means removed, in the development of
the two pendant pictures. In his Assassination of the Duc de Guise, Delaroche painted the most
perfect composition of his early years and the work whose bold and evident strategies most
clearly illuminate his position in the development of French nineteenth-century painting.
The gestation of the final version of the Duc de Guise extended over several years, during one
of Delaroche’s most active periods. As early as 1830, he painted a watercolour version in which
the broad lines of the composition are already clear.+ A further, highly finished version which is
dated 1832 entered the collection of Anatole Demidoff (illus. 106). Presumably as a result of

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 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

106 Death of the Duc de Guise, 1832, watercolour and body colour with gum varnish on paper.

seeing one or both of these works, the Duc d’Orleans, eldest son of the newly arrived King
Louis-Philippe, commissioned the oil painting, which was completed before Delaroche left
for Italy in June 1834 and finally exhibited in the 1835 Salon on his return.” In depicting this
bloody episode from French sixteenth-century history, Delaroche was following up his proven
interest in the period of the Wars of Religion, which was already manifest in the painting ofthe
Young Caumont de La Force around 1825. Henri, Duc de Guise, was a member of the powerful
ruling house of Lorraine, whose initiative in placing himselfatthe head of the Catholic League,
in opposition to the Huguenots, impelled him to challenge the authority of the weak and vacil-
lating French King, Henri HI, and led to his murder at the Chateau de Blois in 1588. Although
Delaroche had selected yet another narrative of usurpation, in the very year when Louis-
Philippe had displaced his Bourbon cousins, this was a historical reference which was congenial
to the Orléans family. As previously mentioned, Louis-Philippe’s mother had inherited the
Chateau d’Eu in Normandy, which was closely associated with the assassinated Duke. At a
later stage, Louis-Philippe’s second son, the Duc d’Aumale, was to revive the title of Duc de
Guise for his own male descendants. The Duc d’Orleans, probably the most popular member
of the family and heir to the throne until his accidental death in 1842, was evidently so delighted
that he gave Delaroche double the agreed price for the painting.”° He also paid him a compli-
ment whose value could not be computed in monetary terms by commissioning a pendant for
the work from Ingres.””
Having settled his composition at an early stage, and worked for four years on the fine-
tuning of his pictorial syntax, Delaroche could expect to avoid the threat of incoherence that

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 PAW DPE AN OG Te

|
| *
|
I

107,108 King and Ambassadors from the Four Studies for the Assassination ofthe Duc de Guise,
c. 1833, pencil drawing.

the spectator encounters in Cardinal Mazarin. Indeed, there is a set of four large drawings for
the figures in the composition, which shows how the overall narrative could be broken down
into separate segments. Undated, but almost certainly belonging to the period of adjustment
between the Demidoff and the Orleans versions, this series has been framed and titled to
denote the separate plot functions reading from left to right: King, Ambassadors, Murderers
and Victim (illus. 107-110). Whether or not this articulation of the different elements was the
idea of the collector who bought the drawings is hardly material. The transition from the
nervous king in profile, through the row of expostulating ambassadors, to the inward-facing
blunt executioners — and finally to the lonely body of the stretched-out victim — is exactly cal-
culated in semantic and plastic terms.
However, the drawings also demonstrate, conclusively, that they are themselves quite inade-
quate by comparison with the fully realized composition. It is precisely through his daring de-
ployment of the different elements, in a spatial scheme that owes much to his earlier work, that
Delaroche has achieved his successful result. On one level, indeed, the Duc de Giuse can be seen
as a further, extended trope on the ambassadorial motif which I have ascribed to Revoil’s Henri
IV Playing with his Children (illus. 45). Instead of the surprised ambassador, we have the timid
king tiptoeing through the door-hangings to confront a whole row of ambassadors who mediate

[192|
 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

109,110 Murderers and Victim from the Four Studies

for the Assassination ofthe Duc de Guise.

[193|
 PAU LAD ARO1G Ek

111 The Shrouding of Christ, 1853, oil on panel.

his access to the reserved space. The relation to the Princes in the Tower, completed in the same
year as the first sketch, is also a significant one. Apart from the obvious point that an anticipated
murder and a recently consummated murder involve quite different types of mise-en-scene, it 1s
possible to see the Duc de Guise in terms of the transformation and continuation of the inter-
rupted Shakespearean narrative. What if the Princes in the Tower had been represented after the
murder, with the two assassins pointing out their victims to the intruding monarch?
This is not just a facetious question, but a means, however crude, of focusing on the way in
which Delaroche assembled his compositions, combining, recombining and transforming
elements already processed in his own work and that of others. This, of course, did not
exclude the possibility of new connotations arising within the determinate field of each new
assignment. In the sketch that probably follows on from Cardinal Mazarin, there is a painting
of the Crucifixion, hung high on the wall, which 1s no doubt thought appropriate for the private
apartment of a noted collector and cleric (illus. 105). In the Duc de Guise, a Crucifixion appears
ina similar position on the back wall, more clearly signalled in the Chantilly than in the Wallace
version (illus. 72). Particularly in the former, it is as if Delaroche wished to provoke a compar-
ison between the Crucifixion and the spread-eagled position of the victim: as the transitional
drawing shows (illus. 110), Delaroche worked hard to convert the original image in the Wallace
version, with its childish torso and grotesquely disconnected head, into the correctly foreshor-
tened and almost devotional image of the final painting. Returning twenty years later to the
theme of the Deposition, with which he had begun his career as a painter, he produced an in-
tensely devotional work, in which the intermediate role of the Duc de Guise can be clearly sensed
(illus. 141).
This concentration on the figure of the victim, however, brings into play a further dimension
of Delaroche’s work, since it opens up the major question of his position within the canonical

[194|
 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

succession of French nineteenth-century painters. Michael Fried has insisted in his writings on
Courbet and Manet that one of the most significant links in the chain of references which
connects the school of David to the Modernist generation is Honoré Daumier’s lithograph
Rue Transnonain: 15 April 1834, a work which commemorated the police repression in the
working-class quarter of Saint-Martin in Paris, and was published in the press in July 1834
(illus. 112). For Fried, this memorable image betokens Daumier’s position as the ‘chief heritor’
of Gericault, since it refers to the prominent figure of the young male nude in the foreground of
the Raft of the Medusa: its role ‘amounts to nothing less than a reworking (and de-idealization)
of Géricault’s more classically conceived figure.*”
It is hard to avoid enquiring where Delaroche’s Duc de Guise belongs in this narrative. Cer-
tainly there can be no easy assumption that Daumier saw any of the successive stages of Dela-
roche’s work before his own lithograph appeared. The Duc de Guise, as has been stated already,
had to await Delaroche’s return from Italy before being shown at the Salon in the spring of 1835.
Equally, it 1s inconceivable that Daumier would not have been familiar with Delaroche’s work,
and the latter’s more public role as an Academician and teacher from 1832 onwards may well
have given greater accessibility to his unexhibited paintings.”? If there is a version of the Duc
de Guise which closely parallels the figure in Rue Transnonain, it is surely the version from De-
midoff’s collection, dated 1832, which has a similarly ‘de-idealized’ victim as its focus. Daumier
might even have seen a political appropriateness in converting an image which had the approval
of the heir to the throne into a powerful denunciation of the regime’s oppression.
This is mere speculation. But what is worth considering, irrespective of Daumier’s awareness
or lack of awareness of the Duc de Guise, is the place of Delaroche in the sequence which Fried
develops. Delaroche was, after all, an admirer of Gericault, who had received the dying painter’s
approval. His figure of the Duc de Guise might be related to the Rafi of the Medusa by a path no
less direct than Daumier’s. More significantly, the sequence of later paintings, which take the
Duc de Guise as a scarcely veiled source, could well intersect with the sequence that Fried sees

112 Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain: 15 April 1834, 1834, lithograph.

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emerging from Géricault by way of Rue Transnonain. For instance, Delaroche’s star pupil, Jean-
Léon Gérome, completed a Duel afier the Masquerade (Chateau de Chantilly) in 1857, the year
after Delaroche’s death: not only does the dead man in clown’s costume, supported by his fellow
revellers, recall the Duc de Guise by way of the later Deposition (illus. 113), but the subject itself
had reportedly been based on a scene observed by the contemporary Duc de Guise. Gerome’s
preoccupation with the motif of a foreshortened corpse, left alone by those who have com-
mitted the murder, continues through the different versions of his Death ofCaesar (e.g. 1867;
Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD) and reaches its most memorable expression in 1868 in
his Death ofMarshal Ney (illus. 114). But in pursuing this line of development, we ignore the
possible intersections with Fried’s parallel sequence: Manet’s The Dead Torero (1864; National
Gallery of Art, Washington) and his lithograph Civil War (1871). Surely the link between the
two last images becomes more comprehensible if we take into account the intermediacy of
Marshal Ney? Surely The Dead Torero has as much in common with the sprawled figure of the
Duc de Guise as it does with the virtually contemporary Rue Transnonain?
These questions are put forward not to justify the assimilation of Delaroche and Gerome to
some mythical mainstream of nineteenth-century French painting, but to prompt further
thought about what, in the so-called academic tradition represented by these two painters,
pointed to further radical transformations in the domain of visuality. We can easily appreciate,
for example, that one of the features that differentiates Daumier and Manet, on the one hand,
from Delaroche and Gerome, on the other, is the relative placing of their figures within the
pictorial space. In The Dead Torero, Manet having cut the original composition down in size as
a result of the 1864 Salon,?° the foreshortened figure floats in an indeterminate field. In Rue
Transnonain, it is quite a different story: the vigorous modelling of the dead body, in the tradi-
tion of Gericault, establishes a solid presence in the claustrophobic scene. But both Delaroche
and Gerome articulate the position of the dead body, and the movements of those reacting to it,
within an overall panoramic space whose centre 1s left empty. The eye takes in the two comple-
mentary focuses of attention, and the interpretive instinct seizes the narrative connection
between them, but in spatial terms these two operations take place around a void.
Wolfgang Kemp has written a useful essay contrasting Pierre-Paul Proudhon’s Justice and
Vengeance Pursuing Crime (1808; Louvre) with Gerome’s Marshal Ney. In almost all respects,
these paintings separated by sixty years are antithetical. The first depicts a ‘fruitful moment’,
in which we look to the future, the second ‘an accomplished event’. ‘A displacement of activities
takes place — the artist is no longer the fabricator of solid data and relations; instead he arranges
spaces and surfaces, which are open to the projective activity of the beholder?" Kemp 1s well
aware that this considerable shift correlates to a change in the demand that Salon painting
places upon the public. What he calls the ‘constitutive blank’ in Marshal Ney functions in such
a way as to offer the spectator a new, and no longer didactic, type of guidance:

‘The emptiness around the dead hero in combination with the departing soldiers expresses on the
actional level a point of time in the sequence of events that can be determined with relative exactness.
But this distance also needs to be understood symbolically — as the solitude of death, as dishonoring
indifference.”

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114 Jean-Léon Gérome, Death ofMarshal Ney, 1868, oil on canvas.

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 PAUL DE LA RiO'GE

\lmost all that has been said up to now about Kemp’s analysis of Marshal Ney can be seen as
germane to the understanding of the Duc de Guise. Though Kemp goes on to stress the special
importance in the former of the bullet-scarred wall and its perspective alignment, his demon-
stration of the further sophistication of Gérome’s pictorial system does not in any way diminish
the importance of the precursory work of his master. One might say that a major aspect of
Kemp’s argument is rooted in the changes in historical culture that took place over the first
half of the nineteenth century. As has been pointed out in earlier sections of this study,
features of Delaroche’s approach to historical representation from the time of Joan of Arc
onwards can be correlated with the ambitions and achievements of the new French historiogra-
phy. But in his Duc de Guise, Delaroche most definitively realized the pictorial equivalent to the
epistemological claims of the new historiography: the field was to be panoramic, implying two
separate areas of focus, and organized around a ‘blank’, which invited the spectator’s projection.
This is an argument not, indeed, for displacing the Modernist painters from the place they
have come to occupy in the history of the medium, but for investigating what it was — in the
visual language developed by both Delaroche and Gerome — that helped to establish the codes
of the new media accumulating throughout the entire course of the century. Jonathan Crary 1s,
of course, right to point to the prodigious increase 1n optical devices of a more or less participa-
tory nature which characterized the period before the rise of Modernism, and to assert that
‘early Modernism . . . had no special claims in the renovation of vision in the nineteenth
century’.”” But it does not follow from this that the ‘radically different visual language’ estab-
lished (in Crary’s own estimation) by such painters as Delaroche and Gerome 1s irrelevant to
this broader achievement. It is simply that the relatively little attention that they have received
from art historians indicates quite faithfully the reluctance of art history to engage with such
questions.
One of the most illuminating contributions to this debate comes from the short essay ‘On
Composition’, written by the pioneering critic of photography Sadakichi Hartmann. This
begins with an anecdote about a visit to Gerome’s studio, and the painter’s avowal that ‘compo-
sition’ 1s the most important of all artistic accomplishments: ‘Yes, there is nothing else but that
(‘Oui, il n’y a que ¢a’).°* Hartmann goes on to instance Gérome’s own work, including Marshal
Ney, and suggests that his ‘continual alterations’ help us to ‘understand why the constructive
element played such an important part in the creations of the Old Masters’. But his essay then
continues with an elegant investigation of the way in which ‘composition’ is utilized in the
current generation of artist-photographers. Once again, we can see that, in an argument
which focuses attention on the special contribution of Gerome to the wider visual culture, it is
the aspect of Gerome anticipated in the individual development of Delaroche that merits atten-
tion — the trait that led Delaroche’s contemporaries to dismiss him as not being a ‘born painter’.
The same applies to Wolfgang Kemp’s concluding remarks, in his essay on Marshal Ney, where
he asserts: “The successors of the narrator GerOme are the cameraman and the film directors’.
His final sentence is resonant with ideas that lead back, inevitably, to Delaroche:

Art was the great school for the cultivation ofan attitude on the part of the viewer that is active, without

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116 Study for The Duke ofBurgundy, c. 1849, pencil drawing.

being an existential engagement, for the continuation of a medium that seems to have more blanks
than places of determinacy, and yet consists entirely of ‘special arrangements’.

Returning from the broad perspective that connects Delaroche to the emergence of the cinema
— one of the earliest and best-known of French films was in fact an Assassination of the Duc de
Guise” — we can observe the more immediate consequences of the painting in his own devel-
opment. One of its effects was certainly to tantalize Delaroche with a further panoramic project
which he never completed, though a drawing from 1849 provides an adequate sketch of his in-

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tentions (illus. 115). The title given to it in Delaroche’s posthumous catalogue is: The Duc de
Bourgogne has just let it be known, in the Royal Council, that he 1s the author of the assassination of
the Duc d’Orléans.°’ Delaroche has taken his subject from late medieval history, and no doubt
from Barante’s Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne, where Jean-sans-Peur’s extraordinary avowal of
his guilt is fully treated, as are the events leading from that event to his own subsequent assassi-
nation in 1419 at the Bridge of Montereau, twelve years later.” The scene of the drawing is thus,
as it were, suspended between two assassinations, and we see only the evidence of the first,
together with a foreshadowing ofthe second, in the solitary figure of the guilty Duke. Barante
relates that, from the moment he murdered his royal relative, Jean-sans-Peur of Burgundy ‘had
not a moment of rest””? Delaroche has projected a spectacular transformation of the composi-
tional scheme that had worked so well in the Duc de Guise, with the members of the Royal
Council fleeing from contact with the guilty man and leaving a ‘blank’ in the centre which is
almost coincident with the place of the throne. One senses that this almost intolerable staging
of the desertion of authority in the face of self-avowed guilt would have posed problems to De-
laroche, which were not only of a technical nature. It is not surprising that he got no further
than this sketch. But the related studies of the particular figure of Jean-sans-Peur indicate
how, in following up this theme, Delaroche had allowed his remoter historical subject-matter
to be conflated with his new work on more contemporary historical material (illus. 116). The
brooding duke who has just made his confession is cousin to the absorptive figure painted two
years previously: Napoleon at Fontainebleau (illus. 154).

* * *

It is appropriate to place next to the Assassination ofthe Duc de Guise, Delaroche’s most innova-
tory painting despite its small format, the largest and most ambitious project which he com-
pleted: the Hemicycle of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, begun in 1837 and opened to the public in
1841. This is not only because the Hemuicycle represents a considerable development of the pan-
oramic presentation that we have been following in the last section, but also because, of all
Delaroche’s works, these two were bracketed together as combining aesthetic merit and
popular appeal. Delaborde chose advisedly when he made his claim: ‘The painter of the Hemu-
cycle of the Palais des Beaux-Arts and the Death ofthe Duc de Guise had this privilege of pleasing
the crowd at the same time as the difficult judges.'°° Guizot, who would certainly have quali-
fied among the most difficult of judges, as far as the historical veracity of the figures represented
was concerned, wrote with unfeigned enthusiasm at the time of its completion:

Ihave been unable to free myself and go and see your great work once again, and enjoy your success as if
Thad some part in it. I can enjoy it in all security, as it will continue to increase. It is beautiful, it is true
and complete beauty. I shall return there again one ofthese days in passing, with the public, and Iam
sure that I will hear the ignorant saying that. They are indispensable for success.'°"

If the somewhat patronizing tone of Guizot indicates the politician and popular historian, there
is no doubting the critical qualifications of Charles Blanc who, as editor of the Gazette des
Beaux-Arts in 1860, saluted the achievement of Henriquel-Dupont’s extraordinary engravings

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of the Hemicycle with a panegyric both to the printmaker and to Delaroche himself: ‘Among so
many compositions which have had, over thirty years, the privilege of fascinating the fashion-
able world throughout the whole of Europe, there is none vaster and more famous than the
Heémicycle?'*
It is quite probable that an important element in the success of the Heémucycle was the general
expectation, which held well into the nineteenth century, that the acid test of a great painter’s
achievement was the ability to conceive and complete a major permanent work on an architec-
tural scale, like the acknowledged Masters of the Renaissance tradition.'°* In the Hémucycle, as
Halevy noted, Delaroche chose to pit himself in competition against two illustrious precursors:
Raphael, whose School ofAthens fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican Palace was
the first great allegorical work to attempt the integration of figures in a complex architectural
setting; and Ingres, whose Apotheosis of Homer, commissioned in 1826 for the ceiling of the
Salle Clarac in the Musee Charles X at the Louvre, was widely acknowledged to be among the
most perfect of his works."°* But if Delaroche helped to seal his reputation by opening the
Heémicycle to the public in 1841 — at a time when his decision not to exhibit at the Salon must
already have caused his star to fade somewhat in the popular mind — he was not enabled to
preserve it through the prestige of the Hémicycle much beyond the date at which Charles
Blanc wrote his eulogistic piece. Already in 1855, the removal of Ingres’s Apotheosis to the
Musée du Luxembourg on the Left Bank (and its replacement in the Louvre by a copy) beto-
kened the increasing value being placed on movable pictures, rather than works im situ, which
was to accompany the rise of Modernism. Even the set of engravings by Henriquel-Dupont,
credited by Blanc with giving the Hemucycle a second lease of life, had a short period of celebrity
inasmuch as the very technique of reproductive engraving succumbed to the twin assault of the
photograph and the ‘artist’s print’.
I am not arguing that the unique reputation to which Blanc refers was to vanish overnight.
The European dimension of Delaroche’s fame was indeed sustained in particular by the con-
tinuing accessibility of this major work. Lord Leighton, who was in Paris in 1857 and no doubt
took the opportunity of seeing the Delaroche retrospective, adopted the general form of the
Hemuicycle for one of his own most ambitious projects, The Arts of Industry as Applied to Peace,
begun in 1873 for the South Kensington Museum. Nevertheless, by the end of the century, it
was impossible to recover the distinctive constellation of factors that had made the Hemucycle so
unusually original in its own day: a successor to the great tradition of fresco painting, which was
itself diffused through fine printing and photography,'®’ a pantheon of historical figures which
insisted on historicizing them to an unprecedented degree, and yet exploited a mode of visuality
akin to that of popular spectacle. When the whole work was ‘very discreetly’ cleaned in 1917,
Henry Lemonnier could only exclaim weakly on the offence which it caused to contemporary
sensibilities: ‘We are well aware that the work does not have certain qualities which we appreci-
ate, and some people advocate exclusively (though one might have a discussion on that
point).’°? Eighty years further on, it is perhaps possible to overcome such instinctive distaste
and admire the complex achievement of a work, which epitomizes the good judgement, and
good luck, running like a golden strand through the first half of Delaroche’s career.

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The good luck is apparent in the rapidity with which Delaroche turned a considerable
setback over the Madeleine project into a much more challenging opportunity at the Beaux-
Arts. Delaroche’s refusal to continue with the project to which he had devoted so much pre-
paratory work in Italy contributed to the myth of what Dumas calls his ‘misanthropy’."””
Mirecourt, in characteristically melodramatic fashion, has him reacting on the spot to Thiers’s
forced decision to give the cupola over the apse to Ziegler, in spite of the prior understanding
that he was to have the entire commission. He has Delaroche throwing down in front of the
apologetic minister 25,000 francs which he had received as an advance, and being persuaded
only by the personal intervention of the King to accept the Hémicycle as an alternative.'®? It is
clear, in all events, that the designs for the Madeleine, matured in Italy, had reached an
advanced stage when the project was abandoned, with drawings being completed for all six pen-
dentives. Like its fellow drawings, The Conversion ofSaint Mary Magdalene (Louvre) bears
Thiers’s signature as a mark of approval, and the small painted panel in the Wallace Collection,
which is related to it, demonstrates that Delaroche had carefully worked out the degree of fore-
shortening necessary for a composition that would occupy such an elevated position.'"°
Yet it is hard to resist a sneaking suspicion that Delaroche was mindful of his good fortune in
getting the new project in exchange for the old. The gulf between the intense particularization
of his portrait studies of the monks of Camaldoli and his more halting attempts to idealize has
already been noted. Inventive though the Madeleine designs may be, they aspire to a public
presence entirely different from the private devotional character of the religious paintings to
which he was to turn much later in his career. Moreover, it can hardly be denied that the cz/s-
de-lampe along the nave of the Madeleine offered exceptionally poor visibility for the work. The
Church of the Madeleine had been begun under Louis XV, but only in 1816 had the building
received its decisive impetus, when the construction was entrusted to the Neo-classical archi-
tect Huve. The structure was complete by 1834, and it must have been already evident that free-
standing sculpture and bas relief would continue to have pride of place in it. As was remarked, a
little ominously, in the Magasin pittoresque: “he architecture and the sculpture are completed: it
only remains to place the pictures.''' Writing to Delaroche on 30 April 1835, Huvé betrays
perhaps a measure of anxiety when he assures the artist of the detailed arrangements for
framing and gilding, and for treating the adjacent stonework.''* The loss of the cupola to
Ziegler would indeed have deprived Delaroche of the only chance of a well-lit, spacious com-
position which was not upstaged by the elaborate sculptural decoration. At present, though
Ziegler’s cupola can be seen, the six pendentives have darkened to a state of invisibility, and
(to use the terms of the typewritten guide to the building) ‘la peinture est un peu sacrifiée’,
By contrast, Delaroche’s contribution to the Palais des Beaux-Arts involved him in a major
scheme of which, as a professor and as a historical painter, he had every reason to approve. The
architect Felix Duban had been commissioned in 1834 to construct the massive new Palais des
Beaux-Arts, with the explicit brief to adapt it for the historical instruction of the young artists
and architects studying in the school. The gateway by the Renaissance chateau of Anet-sur-
Marne by the important French architect Philibert Delorme — which had arrived on the site
as a result of Alexandre Lenoir’s opening of the Musee des Monuments Francais — stood at

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the entry to the new building, and in the interior courtyard there was a chronological grouping
of plaster casts representing ‘the principal monuments of all ages and all countries’.''* This
comprehensive historicist ambition had already — at the very time when Delaroche was
fighting his Davidian colleagues for the reform of the jury system at the Salon — aroused
strong opposition from the Neo-classicists: a commission had reported that it was necessary
to ‘avoid . . . giving too great prominence to works of art whose composition and taste might
not be entirely in harmony with the principles of classical architecture’.''* But Duban, sup-
ported by Thiers, had persisted in his plan. Delaroche’s ‘figured history of art’, designed to com-
plement the semicircular amphitheatre that formed the focus of the new building, was at the
same time perfectly in tune with the advanced pedagogic ideas underlying its construction.'"*
How then did Delaroche’s educational, and to some extent polemical, programme come
across in the ‘figured history’ of the Hémuicycle? Inevitably, much attention was drawn at the
time — and has continued to be devoted — to the important issue of who was represented there
and, hardly less important, who was left out. Raphael’s School ofAthens (the title dating from the
seventeenth century) showed representatives of all the branches of secular learning, as opposed
to the theological learning illustrated on the facing wall. Ingres, in his Apotheosis of Homer, had
grouped a wide range of figures representing the different arts and attainments of the ancient
world around the seated Homer, who is about to be crowned with a laurel wreath. For the
modern period, he had endless difficulty in selecting the group of outstanding writers, artists
and musicians qualified to attend, on a lower range, the apotheosis. Having placed Raphael, his
adored master, as an honorary member of the ‘Ancients’, he can find room among the
‘Moderns’ for only one painter, Nicolas Poussin, whose image and posture — well known from
self-portraiture — greet us from the lower right.""°
Delaroche’s acknowledgement of Ingres’s priority is evident, straight away, in the central
section: in place of Homer, three legendary figures from the beginnings of Greek art are
seated together on a broad marble throne — Ictinus, Apelles and Phidias (illus. 115). As has
been pointed out recently, however, this schema in which Delaroche most clearly evokes
Ingres also underlines his divergence. The elderly architect, Ictinus, and the mature sculptor,
Phidias, are not idealized figures but ‘beings of flesh and blood’, whose bodies display the
signs of relative ageing, particularly by contrast with the younger and more vigorous body of
the painter, Apelles."’” This tendency to de-idealize the classical motifs is also apparent in De-
laroche’s naturalistic treatment of the two allegorical figures who occupy the foreground, dis-
placing attention from the more stereotyped and symmetrical representatives of Greek and
Roman art. As the preparatory sketches clearly demonstrate, Delaroche worked hard to
achieve contrasts in costume, posture and expression between the two females who portray
‘Gothic Art’ and ‘The Renaissance’ (illus. 117-18). The one is soulful and small-waisted, as
though a virgin from a Book of Hours had taken human form. The other is gorgeously draped
and voluptuous: Delaroche’s originality in personifying the Renaissance in this concrete
fashion, at a time when the concept had very little historiographic content or popular
currency, is not the least interesting feature of the Hémicycle.' x
Both the manly vigour of Apelles and the sensual promise of the Renaissance are clearly re-

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 PAU DUE AVRO? Gabe,

117, 118 Studies

forthe Hémicycle: Gothic Art and Renaissance
Art, 1841, oil on canyas.

flected in the choice of artists to fill the flanking sides. Delaroche begins, on the extreme left,
with a sequence of nineteen painters, followed by fourteen sculptors; on the right of the
central composition, he runs through thirteen architects before reaching a further range of
twenty-one painters, which ends with the unmistakable figure of Poussin. Of the sixty-seven
artists shown, just over half (thirty-four, reflecting a generous interpretation of the period)
belong to the Italian Renaissance; this is only to be expected, if we reckon that Delaroche had
just returned from his first visit to Italy, and that he relied considerably, in addition to his own
findings, on the canonical works of Vasari and Bellori. The proportions by nation and by school
are also significant. Delaroche chose to inscribe the names of the various schools above the
painting, in the arching of the vault (illus. 119), but among the Italian regional schools he gave
seventeen artists to Florence and only one each to the Lombard and Bolognese schools. The
French school came next in order to Florence, with thirteen artists in all, whilst the English —
not rating a mention for their school on the vault — had to be content with a single representa-
tive appearing among the architects: Inigo Jones.
It is possible to speculate endlessly on the grounds for the inclusion of particular artists in the
assembly. More telling, however, is the count ofthose who might have been expected to figure,
but do not: this was indeed the aspect that attracted a good deal of publicity, and has continued

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11g Drawing by M.A. Marc of the Hemucycle ofthe Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

to intrigue art historians up to the present day. Alain Bonnet quotes from a contemporary
report that Delaroche was reproached by the Duc d’Orleans for leaving out Lebrun and
Palladio, and retorted wittily, ‘I hardly know Palladio and I do not like Lebrun’? As Bonnet
notes, the remark is certainly apocryphal, since Palladio does indeed figure in the Hémucycle.
But there is probably more than a grain of truth in it. It was only in 1838, after Delaroche had
embarked on the composition, that he undertook a short journey to Ravenna and the Veneto,
parts of Italy neglected in his earlier trip and doubtless utilized at that stage in order to do his
homework on figures such as Palladio. The Venetian architect is now one of the most prominent
of his company, seen in profile standing with his back to the spectator, to the left of the seated
Brunelleschi (illus. 119). As far as Lebrun is concerned, the exclusion must surely be deliberate,
though his name did figure on Delaroche’s early list.'*° Delaroche’s preference for Lesueur, as
an embodiment of the native qualities of French art in the seventeenth century, has already
been noted, in the context of his copy after the Salutation angélique.’*' He has given Lesueur a
particularly sympathetic rendering, as a shy young man who looks straight at the spectator, with
the Florentine primitive Orcagna on his left, and Leonardo making up the trio (illus. 125).
How far did Delaroche intend the juxtapositions of artists to be in themselves significant,
and how far did the posture and relative visibility of various figures imply a judgement,

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120, 121 Study for the Henucycle, c. 1838, paper mounted on canvas.

positive or negative, on their stature and relevance as examples? Although there may well be a
few examples in which the visual syntax can be shown to be semantically overdetermined — the
prominence of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and finally Poussin, towards the right edge,
being one case — it would certainly be difficult to work out in detail an ingenious interpretation
of this kind. More often than not, Delaroche was engaged in the formal problem of balancing
figures and attitudes against one another, taking into account the more or less well-founded
historical data that he could use to create an individual portrait. The process can be followed
in miniature, as it were, in a succession of versions for the extreme left-hand edge of the com-
position. ‘The small painting at Nantes which shows an early state of the entire panorama indi-
cates a simple, planar arrangement at this point, with Correggio emerging from the left-hand
edge of the frame and Antonello da Messina facing away from the spectator, so that he cuts offa
small, barely identifiable face (illus. 120). A further drawing shows greater attention to the co-
herence of the group, though Correggio has been transformed into a stiffly posed and oddly
draped figure, while the Spanish painter Murillo has put in an appearance between him and
the hardly less wooden Antonello. Somewhat later in sequence comes the rapid pen sketch in
which Antonello has been brought alive by an audacious borrowing from the repertoire of
Venetian painting (illus. 122). Delaroche may well have seen, by this stage, the large ceremonial
works of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, and he would certainly have known the splendid youth
from the Compagnia della Calza whom Mercuri engraved for Bonnard’s Costwmz (illus. 126) 122

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122 Study for the Hemicycle (Antonello da Messina

and Correggio), c. 1839, pencil drawing.

The final appearance of the Hemuicycle avoids the rather incongruous coupling of an effete
Antonello and a brusque Correggio which characterizes the pen sketch. Correggio chats with
Veronese; Murillo stares from a distance; Van Eyck, whose face is just visible wedged behind
Antonello in the large pencil sketch, is now seated and forms a triangle with the strikingly
posed Antonello who was believed to be the first Italian painter to have had first-hand knowl-
edge of the oil technique of the Flemish school (illus. 127).'~

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This detailed analysis may, however, obscure the main point about the Hémicycle, and the
way in which it relates both to Delaroche’s educational aims and to the connection with con-
temporary forms of spectacle. Delaroche may use some of the techniques of traditional
history painting, varying the disposition of figures according to the classic principles of istoria
inculcated by Alberti. But his desired effect is very different. In the first place, the technique is
not traditional fresco painting, which would have required the application of paint to wet
plaster, but a method involving a mixture of oil and wax, favoured by several of his contempor-
aries, and creating a brilliant colouring with heavy impasto. In the second place, of course, the
semicircular format and the positioning of the work within the architectural space combine to
make a particular address to the spectator. The engraving from L///ustration makes this clear by
calling attention to the intimate relationship between the array of artists of all ages and the
randomly posed members of the nineteenth-century public (illus. 11g). As this print
mentions, the title for the amphitheatre was at the time the Salle de la Distribution: that is to
say, it was used on ceremonial occasions for the distribution of prizes to the students of the
Beaux-Arts. We can imagine a different contemporary print in which this function would
have been depicted, and this would serve to highlight the importance, visually and concep-
tually, of the foregrounded central figure of the Génie des Arts, who 1s about to distribute a
laurel wreath (illus. 124). Not yet present in the Nantes painting, this figure suggests a
response both to the possibilities of the space and to the function of the assembly room. If
Ingres showed a figure of Fame crowning Homer, here is a more accessible Genius offering
the wreath to the school’s own prizewinners.
As [ have been using the term ‘panorama’ consistently throughout this section, especially in
connection with the Hemuicycle, it is important to clarify how this term is being used, and how
Delaroche’s achievement might relate to the more specific developments in contemporary
spectacle. Halevy wrote of the Hemicycle, in terms which perhaps appear more significant if
we detect an implied contrast with the ceiling painting that was the setting for Ingres’s Apotheo-
sis ofHomer: ‘It is men that Delaroche wished to paint, and not pure spirits. He shows them on
earth, not in the sky”'** The visitor did not have to crane his or her neck unduly (as the print
from L’//lustration shows) in order to locate and establish eye contact with the individual
figures; a pleasant scene of instruction could take place (as the print again demonstrates) when
one more expert connoisseur might take the opportunity of instructing his young companions
(illus. 119). That Delaroche and the architect Duban were aware of the conditions of viewing
and carefully adapted them to maximum visibility and legibility is evident from the
correspondence which took place in 1856, the year of Delaroche’s death, as a result of a near-
disastrous fire in December 1855. In the reconstruction that was necessary after this event,
Duban opened up a gallery on first-floor level, which placed the spectator directly opposite
the painted area. In a letter of 22 June 1856, he assured Delaroche: “The box is open, and I
have no doubt of its good effect. Your painting will gain from it a more general point of view
than the one from below, and the room itself will gain in space and aspect.’'*>
Delaroche’s high degree of interest in the new forms of visual spectacle, which used devices
of lighting, architecture and perspective to obtain compelling illusions, is an issue that needs to

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 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

TN aR,
OTTO ORONO

123 Central section of the Hemicycle of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 1841, oil paint mixed with wax.

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 PAUL DE TARO Ginkk

124,125 Left- and right-hand sections of the Hémicycle of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

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PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

211|
 PA Gs (DE ACR OG iets

126 Paul Mercuri, Study after Venetian

Painting, 1829, coloured engraving.

127 Correggio, Veronese, Antonello da Messina, Murillo, van Eyck and Titian in a detail of the left-hand edge of
the Hemicycle of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

[2a
 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

128 A Family Scene, 1844-7, oil on canvas (unfinished).

 PAUSE Daag
OnGrE a

129 Mother and Children, c. 1843, oil on panel.

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 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

est

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Ra
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130 A Child Learning to Read, 1848, oil on panel.

 PAUL DEL A ROCHE

131 Childhoodof Pico della Mirandola, 1842, oil on canvas.

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PORTR PANORAMAS

132 Herodias, 1543, oil on canvas

[217]
 PAUL Dit A RO GE:

133 Virgin and Child, 1844, oil on canvas

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 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

34 Girlina Basin, 1845, oil on canvas (unfinished).

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 PAT i Dine Roe Hick:

135 Paul Delaroche, 183 8, charcoal drawing with estompe and sanguine.
 PORTRAIT S 3 O3AIN
© RA MASS

136 Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1850, oil on canvas.

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 PAUL DED AK© Garnit

137 Young Christan Martyr, 1855, oil on canvas.

POPS REAGT esa OF PAIN
OUR A IM AUS

138 Sait Veronica, c. 1856, oil on panel.

 PAE DE IAA RO iG ra

139 Fainting of the Virgin, 1856, oil on canvas (unfinished).

140 Return from Golgotha, 1856, oil on canvas.

224 |
 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

be investigated further, but there is strong circumstantial evidence for its likelihood. It was a
student of Horace Vernet, the former Napoleonic officer Jean-Charles Langlois, who, in 1831,
opened a great rotunda fifteen metres high and thirty-eight metres in diameter near the site of
the present Place de la Republique, where the device of the panorama achieved its ultimate re-
finement: instead of the traditional viewing platform, the public were offered a stance on the
deck of one of the ships that had taken part in the Battle of Navarino, and thus transported
‘into the centre of the action’.’*? That Delaroche was also aware of the experiments of
Daguerre in harnessing the illusionistic possibilities of light is also highly likely. The role
which he played in validating the invention of the daguerreotype, in response to Arago’s
request, is well known and will be investigated further in the next chapter. Less well known is
the fact that he was appointed assessor to work out compensation due to Daguerre when his
Diorama was destroyed by fire in 1839.'~7
The Hemicycle, of course, was not a panorama in the sense of a spectacle covering a full circle,
neither was it a spectacle using the possibilities of specially controlled light. But, in its skilful
manipulation of the semicircular field, it underlined and enhanced Delaroche’s didactic pro-
gramme. It anticipated the type of serious attention to the panoramic display of useful knowl-
edge, which was to be given, in the following decades, by critics on an international scale such as
Dickens, Ruskin and Alexander von Humboldt (the latter a friend and admirer of Dela-
roche).’** One might say that the wheel had turned full circle when, in 1859, Robert Jefferson
Bingham exhibited at the 1859 Salon his large albumen print of the Hemucycle, which was
judged to be one of the great successes of the exhibition.’*? Delaroche’s composition had
begun with the long strip painting (illus. 120), and proceeded over four years in all to fill out
the architectural dimensions of the Salle de la Distribution. Bingham crowned his remarkable
achievement in providing photographs for the catalogue raisonné ofJules Godde by utilizing the
reduced version signed by Delaroche in 1853 (now in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore), and
expressing the panoramic field, once again, as a flat image. For those who could not visit Paris —
for art students and connoisseurs — this prospect offered in miniature the vast project of a
‘figured history’, to be scrutinized and annotated by the owner.'*°
Yet one may well ask what were the further implications of the view of the history of art
embodied by the Heémucycle. In Delaroche’s generously inclusive list of artists, there was room
for Gothic architects, such as Erwin von Steinbach and Robert de Luzarches (the designers of
the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Amiens, respectively), but there was no room for any painter,
sculptor or architect ofany kind from after the seventeenth century. Delaroche’s rich and lively
array testifies at the same time to his conviction that, ‘From now on the harvest is over’. ‘The
viewer gains, from the vicarious contact with these sedulously realized figures, an illusion of
interchange which can never quite approach the reality of dialogue, since for all their palpability
they are immured within the otherness of the historical dimension. In that sense, Delaroche’s
work is more significant as an inaugural moment in the history of art, as it has developed over
the past century and a half, than as the historical aid to new artistic talent that its site proclaimed
it to be. It is not at all inappropriate, from this point of view, that Delaroche should have

-—te N On Ll
 PAUL DELLA ROG:

happened upon the invention of the daguerreotype in the period when he was working on the
Heémicycle, and offered his famous (if apocryphal) judgement, ‘From today painting is dead’."S’
For painting to be dead as a result of the invention of photography, and for painting to be
dead as a result of the birth of history of art — these alternative scenarios come into phase, as it
were, in the phenomenon of Delaroche’s Hémicycle. Much has been written, in the wake of
Michel Foucault’s brilliantly suggestive treatment of Bentham’s Panopticon, of the connection
between power, knowledge and display in the history of the museum. In terms of Foucault’s
central example, it is instructive to pursue the analogy between the Hémicycle and a form of
‘disciplinary’ structure — the ideal prison — which ‘produces domains of objects and rituals of
truth’.'** Just as the ingenious building projected by Bentham ensures a non-reversible surveil-
lance from the central viewing tower of the arc of individual cells, so the vista ofartists of all ages
opens up a field of knowledge in which chronology has been comprehensively spatialized for the
spectator’s benefit. One could repeat, in relation to the spectacle offered by Delaroche, Fou-
cault’s comment on the efficacy of the panoptical scheme in redistributing the operations of
power for a society whose focus is no longer the supreme monarch. ‘Power has its principle
not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes;
in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are
caught up."
In the Hemicycle, then, every spectator becomes the patron of each individual artist, insofar as
each can be singled out and made the focus of the spectator’s gaze. The artists may be grouped,
approximately, in a series of ‘schools’. But these, again, are projections of our own classificatory
system, and do not reveal immanent connections which challenge the primacy of the visual
ordering. All is on the surface, in one sense, and the visual syntax turns out on closer inspection
to be nothing more than that. These artists are not involved in ‘conversation’, sacred or profane.
Even where there appears, occasionally, to be a reciprocity of gestures — Correggio touching
Veronese’s shoulder, on the extreme left, and Veronese signalling with his right hand (illus.
127) — the exchange of signs must be interpreted, at most, as a kinship of styles. We know
from the key that, when Correggio died in 1534, Veronese was only six years old. It is not that
Delaroche reduces the depiction of the artist, however, to a visible manifestation of individual
style. Quite the opposite; style itself is made manifest as an aspect of character, and the profund-
ity of character crystallized in the outward gesture and expression. What could Leonardo
possibly have to say to Domenichino, who inclines his head confidentially in the centre of the
right-hand group of painters? It hardly matters. But what was important for Delaroche was the
opportunity to work on the figure of Leonardo, revising the crudity of the pencil study until he
reached a formulation with which he was sufficiently happy to dedicate the oil sketch to his
friend Alphonse de Feltre (illus. 141).
It is in this sense, perhaps, that Delaroche’s achievement with the Hémicycle is a more sub-
stantial one than the close congruence with the model of the panopticon would lead us to
expect. Donald Preziosi has rightly noted that Foucault’s analysis can be updated to underline
a particular aspect of the methodology of contemporary art history: ‘let us note that the invisi-
bility of the panoptic observer-analyst in relation to living objects of study can be seen as

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 PORTRAITS TO PANORAMAS

141 Study for the Hemicycle: Leonardo da Vinci, 1841, oil on canvas.

equivalent to the stance of detachment of the modern disciplinary analyst vis-a-vis his or her
domain of study.'** Preziosi is surely justified in viewing the present-day museum as, in one
sense, the epitome of this art-historical stance: in the museum, ‘all diachrony, all difference, all
multivocality is enframed in synchronicity’. °° But the very disparity between this image and
the spectacle offered by the Hemicycle is what must be taken into account. For the Hemucycle was
not a museum like the Louvre or the Luxembourg, any more than it was a representative
display of contemporary art, like the Salon, whose annual exhibitions Delaroche had just aban-
doned. It was, however, a strategic intervention in the debate about contemporary art, a protest
against the tyranny of the unhistorical ‘classical’ alignments, and a plea for an academic practice
of painting which acknowledged the irreversibility of the expanded consciousness of history
fostered by the Romantic age. In the Hemucycle, Delaroche most fully expressed the relationship
to the art of the past which his distinctive background and upbringing had nurtured in him, and
which put him in tune more than any other contemporary painter with the imaginative reap-
propriation of history so compulsively sought throughout Europe in the period.

——te to ~I ——
 FOUR

The Holy Family and Others

T29

HE PUBLIC opening of the Hémuicycle in 1841 brought Delaroche’s work to the centre of
|P attention once again, but did not alter his decision to withdraw definitively from the
Salon. For the remaining fifteen years of his life he worked almost exclusively for private
patrons. The large-scale composition of the Takers ofthe Bastille before the Hotel de Ville was
completed in 1839, with the aid of Robert-Fleury (illus. 51). But it failed to add to his reputa-
tion, since only two of the four paintings commissioned in 1830 were completed, and the pair
were placed in storage.’ A further important state commission was Charlemagne Crossing the
Alps, one of five very large paintings intended for Louis-Philippe’s historical museum at the
Chateau de Versailles, which Delaroche undertook in 1838. Although he produced studies for
the other works in the series, and embarked on his second Italian journey in that year princi-
pally to gain knowledge of the Byzantine art at Ravenna which he judged relevant to the early
medieval period, he had difficulty even in finishing this single work. It was completed in 1847
only as a result of the major contribution of his pupil Gerome, who was later to describe himself
as Delaroche’s collaborator.”
This inhibition about the completion of major projects does not necessarily point to a failure
of imagination or morale. Throughout this later period, Delaroche’s secondary reputation was
maintained, and indeed increased, by the diffusion of the prints after his works published by
Goupil. At least up to 1845, when the death of his young wife delivered a blow from which he
never fully recovered, he remained sanguine about the possibility of breaking new ground in his
work. On the point of setting out for a second long visit to Rome, in July 1843, he wrote with
assurance to Henri Delaborde: “They say that my last works are the best, am making progress
— Italy will do the rest. In the same letter, he announced with equal confidence: “Today I signed
my Herodias. | believe you will not be unhappy with it’ Even ten years later, when the Revolu-
tion of 1848 had disrupted his professional life, and his wife’s death had been followed by the
very serious illness of his eldest son in the cholera epidemic of 1849, Delaroche continued to
have faith in his painting, though in little else. His studio at Nice enabled him to work unremit-
tingly during a large part of the year, while safeguarding his delicate state of health.°
Referring to Delaroche’s intimate correspondence — virtually all of it from the later period of
his life — cannot fail to create a contrast, even an anti-climax, after the record of his years of
achievement with the Salon paintings and the Hémuicycle. Even if Dumas’s accusation of misan-
thropy is partly belied by the confidences he reveals to his close friends, the suspicion remains
 TE Ee OUnY SEAM yes IN ID © 1 Et RS

142 Louis Roux, The Studio ofDelaroche, c. 1855, oil on canvas.

that it was justified by the more austere face that he displayed to those with whom he was less
well acquainted. For the whole of this period, then, the life of Delaroche centred upon the
family. This meant primarily the family which he created with Louise Vernet in the ten years
of their married life: after her death in 1845, the well-being of his two young sons was invariably
one of his major concerns. But hardly less important — and of capital significance for his life as
an artist — was the extended family to which his position as master of one of the most important
studios in Paris, and Europe, gave him access.
Having taken over the studio of his former master, Gros, after his tragic death in 1835, De-
laroche continued to maintain it until the summer of 1843, when he left for his second extended
stay at Rome. The young painters who studied with him were, apart from all else, an invaluable
source of help, in completing the Hemucycle as well as with the large projects already cited. His
pre-eminence as a teacher and the authority that he carried in the state patronage of art educa-
tion may be well gauged by the successes of his pupils in the competition for the Prix de Rome
in 1841. In the genre of historical painting, his pupils accounted for six of the twenty artists
admitted to the competition, four of the ten finalists, and the ultimate Premier Grand Prix. In
historical landscape — his own first area of study and a continuing concern as a teacher — they
amounted to seven of the initial group, three of the eight finalists, and an equal second prize-
winner.” It goes without saying that his name as studio master occurred more frequently on
these lists than that of any other artist. Although Delaroche finally closed his studio at the
Beaux-Arts in 1843, yielding to the attractions of Italy, he never ceased to have younger artists
around him. When Louis Roux (one of the finalists from 1841) painted him in the studio of the
 PAU DE TARO GE

Rue de la Tour-des-Dames around 1855, he showed an informal grouping around the seated
Delaroche: Roux himself, Jalabert, Jourdan, Robert-Fleury /i/s and Delaroche’s son, Horace
(illus. 142).
These younger artists became added, in their turn, to the company of intimate friends in the
artistic milieu that Delaroche had nurtured since his youth: Eugene Lami and Henri Delaborde
being first and foremost. That Delaroche had a remarkably elevated idea of his role as a teacher
and guide for these selected pupils is well shown by the care he took of the young Ernest Hebert,
the founder of the museum in Paris that still bears his name. Delaroche’s guidance had helped
to secure him a place at the French Academy at Rome, before his own visit in 1843/44. But
Hebert became ill, and his distraught father had to write to Delaroche, begging that he inter-
vene with the authorities to allow a prolongation of Ernest’s stay. Over-anxious M. Hebert peére
may well have been; but he took consolation from what Delaroche had said to him at the time of
the competition, and quoted it back in his letter: “You believe you love your son, because you are
his father — well, I perhaps love him more than you, I will get him to go the right way.” Dela-
roche not only saved Hebert from the consequences of his untimely illness, but took a guiding
role in his further development. In 1849, he took the young man with him on the round of cere-
monial and artistic visits that he made to the cities and courts of Germany. In the winter and
spring of 1851, he had him to stay at his villa in Nice.* Hébert responded, as surviving corre-
spondence attests, by offering a judicious mixture of praise and criticism of Delaroche’s works.”
In the letter he wrote to Horace after his father’s sudden death 1n 1856, he lamented the heavy
loss to ‘us, his pupils, his adoptive children’."° He probably knew that the friend who had sat up
all night with Delaroche on the eve of his death was his fellow former pupil Jalabert.""
These more or less anecdotal details about the latter part of Delaroche’s life acquire a new
sense if we look with care at the guiding themes of his painting from around 1840. In the
1820s, he had tried to find his way among the different paths that had opened up after the with-
drawal of David. In the 1830s, he had for several years occupied the position of a maitre d école,
whose individual achievement was confirmed by the successes of the Salon, and by the presti-
gious commission of the Heémicycle. By the end of the decade, however, his impetus had been
deflected in two main directions. He had embarked on what was to prove a major series of paint-
ings based on the life of the Emperor Napoleon, in which the motive of exploring his own sense
of selfhood in terms of the anguish of modern heroism was never far from the surface. He had
also begun to paint his own family — his wife and his two sons, Horace and Philippe. But far
from being a mere distraction, these family portraits generated some of the major works of his
later years. If the theme of Napoleon provided allegories of selfhood, the family theme was a
source of allegories of nurturing: indeed the relationship between the two could be seen as a
symmetrical one, opposing the unquiet self to a scenario of beneficent and joyful motherhood,
which, however, threatened to tip over unexpectedly into its complete reverse.
It is important to stress precisely what is being claimed for this analysis, as opposed to the
review of sources and visual structures that has been applied to his earlier works. Delaroche
did not simply pass from history painting to personal history, and this will not just be a sympto-
matic reading of his paintings in the later period. It would be more true to say that there is a
 TE EO AM AND ON Hn Res

close parallel between the movement from self-inscription to public performance, which has
been traced here, in the period from 1820 to the early 1830s, and the dynamic that developed
in the last two decades of his life. No longer preoccupied with ‘making a name’ for himself,
Delaroche nevertheless explored his new identity as an artist resolutely set against public exhi-
bition, and yet combining the two roles of master of a studio and father of a family. The self-
scrutiny of the early years had resulted in the unequivocal achievement of such paintings as the
Duc de Guise and Jane Grey, which combined an astute awareness of the development of post-
Renaissance art with a surprising openness to the innovations of contemporary visual culture.
The dynamic of the last twenty years operated in a similar fashion, but from a different basis. In
place of the interchange with contemporary ‘masters’ — Gros, Guerin, Géricault, Schall —
which characterized his youthful efforts, there was an informed engagement with the Renais-
sance masters celebrated in the Hemuicycle, and in particular, the supreme master painter canon-
ized by tradition, Raphael. But this knowing rearticulation of Renaissance models leads, once
again, to new work of outstanding originality, which draws on the visual culture of the mid-
nineteenth century. Delaroche’s religious paintings from the 1850s return to the panoramic
format, and offer a reading of space which is integrally related, I believe, to the new photo-
graphic vision.
Of course such an overall interpretation of Delaroche’s work in these years cannot hope to
accommodate every painting or even every painting of significance. For example, it bypasses
the issue of Delaroche’s participation in the Rococo revival of the mid-century, which is epito-
mized by the charming Gul on a Swing of 1845 (illus. 143).'* The positive advantage of such a
reading is that it provides not a strait-jacket for confining interpretation, but a means of ac-
counting for the real doubts and ambiguities that have become attached to several of Delaro-
che’s most prominent works over the years. For example, the so-called Girl in a Vase,"*
sometimes called Sappho and in consequence described as ‘probably the only erotic figure
painted by Delaroche’,'t was given a deservedly prominent place in the large exhibition ‘Les
Années romantiques’ (t995—96). But no one has yet offered a plausible interpretation of this
erotic lapse, even supposing that it is one (illus. 134). The unfinished work purchased from the
Delaroche descendants by the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, in 1995 has been saddled with
the title Sketch for ‘The Childhood ofPico della Mirandola’ (illus. 128). But it 1s almost certainly
not a sketch, and does not predate the outstanding work of 1842. Why has the error been per-
petuated, and is it possible to correct it?
These two examples may provoke the ready answer that incomplete work, and work remain-
ing in the artist’s studio, offers no satisfactory basis for an argument about meaning. It is true
that the Girl in a Vase (or Girl in a Basin, as I shall translate it) was sold from Delaroche’s studio
only after his death, and that the century and more that the so-called Sketch spent in the Dela-
roche family may have distorted its specific relation to the well-known painting of which it
recalls some elements. But I would argue that such examples are not inadmissible. On the
contrary, the very problems that have arisen in relation to their status enable us to understand
that similar ambiguities exist in the other, more canonical works, though their impact may have
been diminished by the effects of time. Above all, my approach will take it for granted that, for

[231]
 PA UIE (Dil, DAs OrG HE

143 Girl on a Swing, 1845, oil on panel.

 st es OMe AUN sy eeASIND OD EE RSS

Delaroche, creation over these years was a form of working through — not a process orientated
towards specific goals, but a free elaboration of codes, which could be varied and contrasted in
order to add new information. For these purposes, the unfinished works are especially valuable,
since their very openness reveals the machine at work.

Delaroche married Louise Vernet at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, in Rome, on 28
January 1835. Before leaving Rome to sort out the debacle of the Madeleine commission, he
took the opportunity of painting a small portrait in vignette of his twenty-one-year-old wife,
in the form of an Angel’s Head (illus. 144), which allied her image to the early Renaissance
frescoes he had been studying in Florence. In Blanchard’s print, published by Goupil, the
image is reversed and captioned “The Angel Gabriel’, which makes it all the more apparent
that this is an annunciatory angel, perhaps drawn from one of the works of Fra Angelico."®
With this direct conflation of Christian iconography and the portrait study — anticipated only
by the Saint Amelia of 1831 (illus. g2) — Delaroche achieves a pure simplicity, distinct from the
elaborate machinery of the Madeleime studies. In his Saint Cecilia of 1836, which was shown at
the 1837 Salon with Strafford and Charles I, he radically pares down his means of expression,
perhaps making restitution for his annexation of Raphael’s image of the patron saint of music
in his caricatural lithograph of 1821 (illus. 12). Delaroche’s Saint Cecilia, widely held at the time
to mark a new orientation in his work, now seems to occupy an ineffectual half-way house

144 Angel’s Head, 1835, oil on canvas.

 PAUL DEDARO GEE

145 Saint Cecilia, 1836, oil on canvas.

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 TEE SEV OUeY SH AIMNN
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146 Louise Delaroche with her son Philippe, November 1845, engraving.

between the historical genre and the Raphaelesque paintings of the 1840s (illus. 145). However it
is noteworthy that Louise Vernet again makes an appearance as the foreground angel who
kneels before the saint.'° Her thick and glossy hair, falling in broad bands around her face,
also makes it possible to identify her as the prime model for a further sequence of mother-
and-child paintings which will be traced here, as well as for the most poignant of all Delaroche’s
works: the intimate portrait of his wife and his younger son, Philippe, in an engraving which
bears the date ‘November 1845’ (illus. 146). Ascribed to the month before Louise’s unexpected
death ‘from a nervous fever’,’” this little image of the mother with her four-year-old son seems
to divine a strange frailty in her half-shaded face, and links her destiny with the cut bloom that
hovers in its tiny vase beyond her shoulder.
This is as close as Delaroche came to a direct representation of his young wife. On the other
hand, his two sons were explicitly depicted at various moments in their childhood and adoles-
cence. The portrait of Horace Delaroche painted in 1841, when he was five years old, has already
been noted (illus. 17). From around 1845 comes a charming picture of the two brothers in
profile, Horace in the foreground wearing a military jacket with padded sleeves."° From 1851
come two informal but penetrating images of the brothers. Horace, now aged fifteen and
 PAUL Dil LAR OG

largely recovered from his grave illness, is shown by lamplight, poring over his books; his
tousled hair poignantly recalls the carefully combed tresses of his mother (illus. 147). Philippe,
aged ten and still dressed as a child, lays his arm along a ledge in a gesture familiar from
Venetian portraiture: he takes less after his mother than Horace, but his large, round, almost
black eyes are instantly arresting (illus. 148).
There can be little doubt about the presence of the same physiognomy, with brooding eyes,
small nose and characteristically downturned mouth, in the smaller of the two children
depicted in A Mother's
Joy eight years previously (illus. 149). Equally, the kinship between the
mother (with her tresses let down so that the elder child is playing with them and they tickle the
baby’s head at the same time) and Louise Delaroche is unmistakable. But these very indices of
Delaroche’s domestic life occur within a framework that is stylistically overdetermined. Painted
as a result of a commission from King William II of Holland, this picture in the form of a tondo
is not only an evident homage to Raphael but also an acknowledgement of the way in which
Raphael had been used as a model by his foremost interpreter among modern French
painters, and Delaroche’s colleague at the Institut: Ingres. Delaroche’s special interest in
Raphael is perceptible after his first visit to Rome, in the painting of Sait Cecilia. It commu-
nicated itself to his pupils, and we find Hebert writing home on their joint visit to Germany in
1849 about the Sistine Madonna in Dresden — ‘certainly the most beautiful in existence’.'? But to
imitate Raphael was certainly, for a mid-nineteenth-century French painter, to acknowledge
Ingres. As early as 1817, Ingres had completed a copy of the Madonna mith Candelabra, a
painting in the fondo form, and around 1842 he was completing designs for a further group of
circular compositions, destined for the stained-glass windows of the church of Saint Ferdinand
de Paris.”
The differences between A Mother's
Joy and the composition for Charity by Ingres, which
superficially resembles it, are nonetheless substantial. Ingres flanks his allegorical mother with
two torches, reminiscent of his earlier copy after Raphael. But his etiolated figures produce a
vertical emphasis in the composition so inimical to Raphael’s replete rounded forms that the
names of Puvis de Chavannes and Leger have been cited in relation to it.~’ Delaroche chooses
the precedent of another Raphael fondo, the Madonna della Sedia (Pitti, Florence), and remains
faithful to the suggestion of gently swelling forms, which Raphael elicits by association with the
polished wooden baluster. Delaroche’s baluster gleams in the left background, inviting compar-
ison in particular with the glistening white stomach of the relaxed baby boy. But just as the
wooden surface 1s overlaid with a subtle foliate carving, so the whole composition replaces Ra-
phael’s classic simplicity with a plethora of texture and detail, stopping only just short of an
overload. Delaroche has no wish to iron out the indices of naturalism: on the contrary, he fore-
grounds the elements that allow us to see the work, in part, as a family portrait, rather than an
experimental exercise in new forms.
A Mother's
Joy has an evident connection with the small fondo, painted on mahogany, which
is in the Wallace Collection, and with what must be the pendant to it, since it is painted on a
panel from the same piece of wood: A Child Learning to Read, which was united with its fellow
tondo after Delaroche’s death by Lord Hertford (illus. 129—30).** But here we begin to sense

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 PAULL DELTA RIO) Gyr

ereater complexities in the chain of connected works, which Delaroche produced in the 1840s,
with the mother and children as its theme. The first Wallace Collection tondo, sometimes titled
The Happy Mother, is undated, but has been generally regarded as a sketch for 4 Mother’ Joy,
which it resembles in almost all respects except the greater plainness of the wooden baluster.
The second tondo, however, is clearly signed and dated 1848, which has raised the hypothesis
that both the panel paintings were completed at the later stage. A further complication is the
contemporary identification of the 1848 fondo with Delaroche’s well-known painting from
1842: it was exhibited in England in 1874 under the title An Idle Scholar, known as La Jeunesse
de Pic de Mirandole.* The capacity of Pic de Mirandole to cast a long shadow over these related
works of the 1840s is, furthermore, demonstrated by the case of the interesting (and undated)
unfinished painting recently acquired for Nantes: identified by Ziff as Renaissance Reading
Lesson, this picture from the Delaroche family collection was (as mentioned previously) sold as
a Sketch for ‘The Childhood ofPico della Mirandol@ (illus. 128).
When is a sketch not a sketch? When is a pendant not a pendant? When does a private work
become public? What significance has a title? All of these issues are raised by this sequence of
works. The answer to them is not to be found in close scrutiny of the relative dates of the series,
even if it were possible to establish these dates with any certainty. Or rather, the question of
relationships within the sequence, important as it is, has to be seen against the unfolding of
Delaroche’s life throughout the decade, and, no less significantly, against the structural devel-
opment of what I have called his ‘allegories of nurturing’. Pico della Mirandola is undoubtedly
the key to the series, and its further significance in relation to Delaroche’s historical projects will
be investigated later in this chapter. For the moment, however, it 1s worth returning to the
issues raised by the series that relates to. 4 Mother's Foy.
Melanie Klein has exerted an influence far beyond the sphere of professional psychoanalysis
with her analysis of the early stages of infant nurture, and their effect on the formation of the
mature person. She has formulated the infant’s initial experience in terms of the differing reac-
tions provoked by the ‘good breast’ and the ‘bad breast’: the latter is the cause of paranoid anxi-
eties in the child, who cannot make sense of the denial of gratification and forms the idea of
breasts as ‘external and internalized persecutors’, the former, on the other hand, contributes to
a lessening of such anxieties, and the formation of a ‘good relation to the mother’ through what
Klein terms the ‘manic-depressive’ stage.*+ In addition to this general framework, there is also
specific reference in Klein’s work to the role of portraiture in working through the experience of
persecution which the adult has retained as a trace in later life. In one case, she considers an
artist who has painted, one after the other, a portrait of an old woman and a further portrait of
her mother: the former represents, through ‘expression of the primary, sadistic desire to
destroy’, an attack on the mother, while the latter magnificently rehabilitates her ‘in full posses-
sion of her strength and beauty’.*>
In the light of these psychoanalytic theories, the structural, if not the chronological, ordering
of Delaroche’s family portraits becomes more clear. Delaroche was not simply painting ‘a
mother’ in the ¢ondos. He was painting ‘the mother’, insofar as his purpose was to transform
the loved image of Louise into a universally beneficent symbol — a ‘good breast’. In that sense,

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the circular format and the presence of the swelling baluster are not simply acknowledgements
of Raphael but tokens of aeuphoric unity between the work and the spectator. Equally, the 1848
panel painting, in which the mother scolds her recalcitrant child, is not simply Delaroche’s des-
pairing complement to the earlier work, after his wife’s death, but a disruption and demolition
of the earlier unity: a regression to the ‘bad breast’. This reading also makes it possible to hazard
an interpretation for the large, unfinished tondo, Renaissance Reading Lesson, which has been
variously dated, but cannot be much earlier than 1845 if we take the two brothers shown on
the left to be Horace and Philippe, placed together as in the Girard print. Comparison with
the November 1845 etching of Louise Delaroche with her younger son suggests, indeed, that
it might date from a year or so later, after the mother’s death. In this case, the curious disengage-
ment of the figure of Louise from the ‘reading lesson’ shown in the foreground would be under-
standable: Delaroche shows her signalling with her index finger as if appealing to someone
outside the pictorial field, while the boys attend in mutual absorption to the lesson adminis-
tered by Pico, the infant genius, here barely sketched. For evident reasons, he cannot coordinate
this composition with its fractured ordering of space into the image of beneficence achieved in
the two versions of A Mother's Joy. Yet, having abandoned the large fondo, he eventually returns
in 1848 to the dystopic version that forms the second small /ondo: no longer a tentative figura-
tion of absence, it becomes a structural reversal of the earlier work, with an aggressive, dark-
haired mother succeeding the blissful Madonna. The bad breast becomes a pendant to the
good.

The purpose of this analysis is certainly not to reduce Delaroche’s work of the 1840s to a crude
biographical and psychoanalytic reading. Nevertheless, in defining the simplest form that De-
laroche’s binary logic takes in the two small ¢ondi, it becomes possible to appreciate a much
more complex logic of antithesis and ambiguity, which underlies several of the more challen-
ging paintings. Indeed, the hypothesis must be that, in this period when Delaroche did not have
to contend with the pressures of public criticism, he came to rely on a private code, which jus-
tified his successive moves, while remaining necessarily opaque to those who happened to see —
or indeed buy — the works themselves. This will be my underlying argument in considering
such important late pictures as the Childhood of Pico (1842), Herodias (1843), Virgin in the Desert
(1844) and the work whose title I retranslate as Gir/ in a Basin (1845).
The Childhood of Pico, first of all, must stand as a codicil to the immense legacy of the Hemu-
cycle, upon which Delaroche had spent the previous four years, and in that sense as a condensa-
tion of the advanced concept of historical pedagogy, which that work embodied. It has already
been noted that he placed at the centre of his composition allegorical figures of Gothic Art and
The Renaissance (illus. 117-18), the latter a voluptuous female figure contrasting sharply with
her slender predecessor. This may have been the first occasion on which allegorical form was
given to the period whose centrality in the history of Western culture was so incontrovertibly
established by the last decades of the century.”° If we follow the writings of Balzac — that invalu-
ble litmus paper of Romantic sensibility — we can trace the gradual emergence of the wider

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concept of period from what was, at origin, a mere marker of style. In the first pages of La Peau
de chagrin (1831), for example, the young hero is assured by the mysterious antiquarian who 1s
doing the honours of his collection that some pieces of sculpted ebony are ‘genuine renaissance’
(vraie renaissance). But very shortly afterwards the same term is being used, with a capitalised ‘R’,
to denote no mere style but the plenitude of the experience of the past: ‘A salt-cellar drawn from
the workshops of Benvenuto Cellini took him back to the bosom of the Renaissance [au sein de la
Renaissance], to the time when arts and licence were flourishing . . 2*7 It is this stronger sense of
the term that Delaroche’s paintings approach, but in the language of the plastic arts where the
telling metaphor of the breast (au sei) finds its equivalent in the vivid interplay of bodily repre-
sentations.
If the Childhood ofPico is thus an allegory of nurturing, it is nurturing of a special kind which
passes by way of the letter. Pico della Mirandola himself must have been chosen as a subject for
the painting because of the simple, emblematic character which he possessed, in a period
largely unacquainted with his turbulent and tragic life: works of reference from the Romantic
period comment on his handsome, fair complexion and his yellow hair, as well as on his prodi-
gious capacity for learning languages, which was noted from an early age.” In this marvellous
child — whom Delaroche has perhaps invested with his second son’s brooding eyes, though he
has conceded a mop of golden curls as well — the Renaissance could be embodied as the
supreme reintegrative moment of Western cultural history, and its relaunching after the
demise of classical antiquity. Pico’s capacity to symbolize this moment was already attested in
the name that tradition had ascribed to him, from his own times onwards: the Phoenix.
Yet no less important than the significance of Pico himself, for Delaroche’s allegory of the
new creative power of the Renaissance, was the specific transmutation of codes of Renaissance
painting in which he had engaged (illus. 131). This 1s a work which recalls Raphael, certainly: the
polished wooden baluster of the Madonna della Sedia peeps from behind the mother’s head, as
it will do once again in the succeeding work, 4 Mother's Joy (illus. 149). But the reference to the
Raphael Madonna serves, in a certain sense, to question rather than to affirm the connection
with the traditional Christian theme. It is not clear whether Delaroche had any relevant infor-
mation on the appearance of Pico’s mother, or indeed on the role she may have played in his
precocious acquisition of learning. But the long, grave face flanked by the bands of dark hair,
which is juxtaposed with the head of the questing child, has its own indubitable pedigree. It
relates to the succession of gently smiling, androgynous figures painted by Leonardo da Vinci,
of which the Saint John the Baptist was probably the last and the most famous, being completed
not long before his final move to France in 1517, and ultimately entering the collection of the
Louvre. Delaroche’s sombre sketch of the elderly Leonardo, completed towards the end of the
Hemuicycle project, shows how deeply this artist preoccupied him, compared with the young
Raphael in his sumptuous and worldly costume (illus. 120, 141). In substituting for the
Raphael Madonna (and indeed for the fleshly presence of the Renaissance allegory in the Hémi-
cycle) this more enigmatic image, Delaroche no doubt acknowledges the wider cultural and
scientific implications of Leonardo’s achievement, compared with the shortlived Raphael. But
in singling out, as his privileged point of reference, precisely the half-smile that Freud was to

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trace across the artist’s entire career as a signifier of sexual ambivalence, Delaroche also
provokes other questions. These, I suggest, come more clearly into focus if we look at the Child-
hood of Pico in relation to its successor, signed on 13 July 1843, Herodias.”°
Delaroche’s Herodias is without doubt one of his strangest and most powerful works: in its
subject-matter, if not in its plastic treatment, it anticipates the preoccupation with the story of
the beheading of Saint John the Baptist, which can be found in painters from Puvis de Cha-
vannes and Gustave Moreau onwards, as well as in writers of the stature of Flaubert and
Oscar Wilde. Unaccountably, the work is titled Sa/ome in the original list of illustrations for
Ziff’s thesis (though corrected in the later edition).*° This however alerts us to an endemic con-
fusion about the roles of the mother and the daughter, which seems also to have affected the
interpretation of later paintings. Puvis de Chavannes’s Salome of 1856 (private collection,
Paris), representing a woman who dramatically holds a dish aloft while the beheading is
arranged in the background, was for a time wrongly known as Herodias.*' Perhaps the biblical
text from the Gospel of Saint Matthew is partly to blame for this confusion, since it closely
identifies the instrumentality of the daughter with that of the mother: ‘Prompted by her
mother, [Salome] said, “Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter”. . . and his
head was brought on a platter and given to the girl, and she brought it to her mother’ (Matt.
14: 8, 11). The distinction 1s, however, crucial for Delaroche’s conception, since it enables us to
see how, in this lengthy series exploring metamorphoses of the maternal role, Herodias holds a
specially significant place.
The argument for seeing Herodias essentially as a pendant to the Childhood ofPico is not a
strong one, if we infer any intention to keep the two works together. The Childhood ofPico was
sold to Delaroche’s faithful patron (and recipient of the Leonardo sketch), Alphonse de Feltre.
Hlerodias was exhibited to great acclaim in Belgium in 1844, and figures among the works that
were not included in the 1857 retrospective; described in the catalogue as belonging to the
Museum of Ghent, it has subsequently become part of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum at
Cologne.** Nevertheless, the two paintings present immediate points of comparison.
Although the Childhood ofPico is smaller than Herodias (116 X 76 cm as opposed to 129 X 98
cm), the proportions are similar. Both offer shallow spaces, screened off by heavy curtains, in
which the foreground is occupied by a dazzling array of sumptuous materials. In the Childhood
ofPico, carved wooden lions set off a lime-green cushion, delicately embroidered, while in
Herodias the dish that holds the severed head is juxtaposed with silken sleeves of exquisitely
shifting hues (illus. 138). Delaroche’s technical assiduity, after the years in which much of his
work had been carried out in collaboration with his pupils, is egregiously to the fore. Yet the
‘fracas’ of which Delaborde complained in the Death of Elizabeth has not been allowed back
again. The eye circulates over the shimmering surfaces and picks up the gently billowing and
rounded forms. But the coherence ofeffect is achieved in particular by the troubling fixation of
the gaze, carried to an extreme degree in Herodias.
Delaroche’s model for the latter painting was drawn from a contemporary portrait sketch,
and not from the store of Renaissance pictorial types. A drawing of Mademoiselle Lavinia
Darriule shows the same striking face, and the same gaze directed over the right shoulder of

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O Gan k

the spectator.*? Who is Herodias looking at, once the portrait sketch has been integrated into
the new, biblical scenario? The question is impossible to answer. But this much can surely be
said: the composition of Herodias depends on a centrifugal, rather than a centripetal, dynamic.
The maidservant, engaged in drawing back the curtain, has a submissive countenance, on
which we can perhaps read the signs of aversion from the severed head. The eyes of the
executed saint are unseeing, though our glance returns to them, inevitably, as it travels across
the surface. Only Herodias appears to fix her gaze on something or someone: King Herod who
has succumbed to her devious plot, or the daughter who has been her willing instrument in
persuading him to order the execution? The psychological point, perhaps, is that her gaze
travels, precisely, away from the saint’s head and rests elsewhere: it does not satisfy her to look
at the results of her strategy, which is in any case exhausted by the success of her manipulative
operations within the family circle, and can lead no further. The Childhood ofPico also illus-
trates, by a detour, what I have called the ‘allegory of nurturing’: the mother offers not the
breast, but the book that will enable the child’s mind to fructify. But Herodias displays, in its
subject and in its pictorial structure, the unfruitful result of a perversion of the maternal rela-
tionship: this is the bad mother following the good.
Richard Wollheim has written persuasively about the way in which Ingres established his
identity as a painter through a submission to convention, which also involved a persistent 1dea-
lization of his father, a relatively unsuccessful artist. Interestingly, he uses Ingres’s commission
from the Duc d’Orléans to paint a pendant to the ‘banal troubadour work of Delaroche in 1834
as one of his prime illustrations. Forced to abide by the dimensions of the Assassination ofthe
Duc de Guise, Ingres produced after six years’ labour his Antiochus and Stratonice, whose elabo-
rate scenario could be summed up in the formula: ‘A father must melt.*+ I do not think that
there is a comparable psychological requirement, which sums up the character of Delaroche’s
work. As I made clear in the first chapter, Delaroche’s initial need to ‘make a name for himself”
can be closely correlated with the establishment ofhis definitive signature and with the realiza-
tion (dated by Delaborde to the 1824 Salon) that he would have to steer a path between defunct
classicism and the superior talent of Delacroix. Essentially, this objective gives whatever sub-
stance there may be to the definition of Delaroche as a juste-muilieu, or an ‘eclectic’ painter. But
the period of the early 1840s, which saw him both as a happy father and as a popular studio
master, also provided the conditions for an exploration of extremes, which was full of signifi-
cance for the future. The distance between the Childhood ofPico and Herodias enabled the emer-
gence in French painting of a concentrated image of malevolent maternity — the phallic mother,
the mother as castrator — unmatched in its intensity until the first Symbolists were drawn to
exacerbate the same vein more than ten years later.*>
Delaroche travels no further along this particular track. But there is one further work of sig-
nificance that belongs to the same sequence of explorations, not because it offers an extreme of
good or bad nurturing, but because its contextual ambivalence sets up a comparable tension,
which 1s inseparable from the experience of the work. The Virgin in the Desert (known in the
Wallace Collection as the Virgin and Child, with the original French variant of Marie dans le
desert) was painted at Rome in 1844 and bought for his collection by the Marquis of Hertford,

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who probably saw it in Delaroche’s studio at an early stage in its composition.*” On one level,
this is a Madonna and Child in the tradition of Raphael and the Umbrian school, which
requires less comment than the earlier paintings discussed here. Like the Virgin of the Vine of
1842 (bought by the English banker Thomas Baring and now in the Baroda Museum, India), it
depicts a stage of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, and the figure of Joseph can be discerned
on a far-off rock, profiled against the right horizon (illus. 133). However, the early confusion
which caused the subject to be identified as ‘Hagar and Ishmael, or some other biblical event’
is not to be dismissed as irrelevant.*” Delaroche has, one can only suppose deliberately, placed
his Virgin and Child in a context which suggests the alternative scenario.
The motif of Hagar and Ishmael — Abraham’s bond-woman and natural son who were cast
out into the desert to fend for themselves — had already had a significant history in French
painting of the July Monarchy. Corot had shown at the Salon of 1835 a magnificent landscape
of Hagar in the Wilderness, where the kneeling woman and her exhausted child are cast into
shade by immense rocks, exotic vegetation and verdant trees (Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York). Horace Vernet had profited from a brief trip to Algeria in 1833 in the conception
of his own Hagar Cast out by Abraham: the palm trees, tents and above all the nomadic costumes
worn by the main figures display a reconciliation of the biblical subject with ethnographic
detail, which was praised by Mérimée when the work appeared at the Salon of 1839.3° Dela-
roche has made some concession to the notion of authentic costume. In a contemporary
portrait of an /talian Woman (Hotel de Ville, Avesnes-sur-Helpe) which Ziff has associated
with the Virgin, the peasant dress is most carefully studied; in the Virgin, by contrast, the
main figure wears a curious scarf, which drapes her left shoulder and eventually encompasses
the Christ-child.*? In all events, the chief attraction for Delaroche of this curiously displaced
subject seems to have resided not so much in the detail of costume as in the opportunity to set
the figures against a vertiginous landscape prospect, less dominant than that of Corot’s Hagar,
but still the authentic record of his own displacement to the scenery of Rome. Delaroche had
written to a friend of the view from his studio at the Villa Médicis, where ‘the beautiful moun-
tains which are on the horizon will serve me marvellously for the landscape of my Virgin’.*°
Nonetheless the rock scenery that he puts on show is clearly identifiable with the site of the
quarries of Cervara, east of Rome, which were a favourite resort for French artists. Delaroche’s
friend and former companion on the visit to Camaldoli, Edouard Bertin, exhibited at the Salon
of 1839 a View of the Quarries ofCervara (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Carcassonne), which strikingly
anticipates Delaroche’s choice of scenery and his plastic treatment of the rock formations."
One way of explaining the latent ambiguities in Delaroche’s Virgin is to view it (in ZifPs
terms) as ‘an ambitious attempt to blend Raphaelesque idealization with the requirements of
nineteenth-century empiricism.” Certainly Delaroche is in no way attempting the almost ar-
chaeological recreation of Raphael which characterizes later works of the period such as Anselm
Feuerbach’s Mary with the Child between Angels of 1860 (Gemialdegalerie Neue Meister,
Dresden). The fact that the identification of the model with the /talian Woman vies with a tradi-
tion that she reveals Delaroche’s future soul mate, Countess Delphine Potocka, is perhaps an
indication of a subject poised between low life and high life, between local colour and the

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ideal. Equally, the presence ofabright green lizard on the rock in the left foreground 1s at least
as likely to be an index of naturalism as a symbol of the soul’s sun-seeking inclination towards
Christ.** But to pair off these seemingly alternative readings is surely to misinterpret the
strategy of Delaroche, which is, precisely, to constitute an inherent ambiguity. ‘The study for
the painting in the Louvre includes a large, pillar-like stone in the left foreground.** But it is
only in the finished painting that Delaroche introduces a deep fissure in the rock face, coinci-
dent with the track of his own signature across it (illus. 19). Similarly, the iconographic range
evoked by the painting — Flight into Egypt, Hagar and Ishmael, even the Deposition, harking back
to his first work of 1820 — conjures up a spectrum of possibilities, which it is the role of Dela-
roche’s authorial gesture to place in suspension, transcending the oppositions by his own name
alone.
A case that provides more than a footnote to the achievement of the Virgin, as well as a sig-
nificant addendum to the earlier part of this argument, is the major work that Delaroche began
after his return from Rome in 1845: this I have retitled, after the original French, Girl in a Basin
(illus. 140). Despite, or indeed perhaps because of, its visibly unfinished state, this has come to
be regarded as one of the pinnacles of Delaroche’s later career, and in its recently cleaned state at
the 1995-96 ‘Les annees romantiques’ exhibition, it certainly justified this estimate. At least
eight studies in the Louvre indicate early stages in the composition, and one of them bears the
subsequently added title ‘Sapho’ [sic] which has become attached to the work in recent years.*
On the basis of this hypothetical identification with the Greek woman poet Sappho, the
painting has been termed Delaroche’s only ‘erotic’ figure, as noted before.*° It has also been
suggested that a careful cull of contemporary literary productions might explain the ‘inspira-
tion’ for the work, just as the poem by Victor Hugo helps to account for the contemporary
Girl on a Swing.’
These speculations surely bypass some reasonably obvious points, which can be ascertained
from looking carefully at the painting. The first 1s that the ‘vasque’ of the current title is a
version, however stylized, of the well-known ‘vasque’, or fountain-basin, of the Villa Medicis,
which had been painted innumerable times by French artists residing in Rome. Inserting
himself into a sequence to which Corot had contributed in the mid-1820s, and Maurice Denis
was to follow up a century afterwards, Delaroche surely signals from his studio in Paris his at-
tachment to ‘my dear Villa Médicis, where I found the angel of my life’** But just as the ‘vasque’
connotes the Villa, so the ‘girl’ reposing there is surely none other than the former Louise
Vernet, whom he met there in 1834 and shared his stay with in 1843/44. That is to say, the
banded hair and regular oval features recall, though pitched horizontally, the image of his wife
recorded in the sad engraving of November 1845, and ascribed here also to earlier works such as
A Mother’ Joy. Among the pencil sketches that anticipate the final composition, there is one in
particular that accentuates the effect of the tumbling hair, which almost obscures the woman’s
face.*?
This must surely imply that the identification with Sappho is very wide of the mark, and the
‘erotic’ quality noted in the work is in fact the trace of a very much more complex emotion.
Delaroche did complete a small oil version of the subject, related to the pencil sketches, which

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was shown in the 1857 retrospective as the property of the Comte de Pourtales and reappeared
in February 1997 at a sale in New York. This delightful little work, ascribed to 1844 in the retro-
spective catalogue, could well be identified with the mid-century taste for small cabinet paint-
ings, offering seductive glimpses of female nudity. But the impact of the large, unfinished work
is significantly different. In particular, there is the effect of the lyre, placed prominently against
the stone parapet, which has led to the posing of Sappho as the hypothetical subject.
The unfinished painting undoubtedly reflects Delaroche’s fascination with the image of his
young wife, and the contrast between the idyll of their return to Rome in 1843/44 and the dey-
astating circumstances of her subsequent illness and death. But, in contrast to the small Pour-
tales painting, the larger work also testifies to Delaroche’s awareness of an important precedent
in the Salon production of the early 1840s. Charles Gleyre, whom Delaroche esteemed so highly
as to entrust his studio to his care in 1843, had made a strong impression at the Salon of the
same year with his work Le Soir, soon to be known publicly by the title Les [//usions Perdues
(Louvre). Gleyre’s twilit scene, so comparable in its general colouring to the dusk of the Young
Girl, incorporates the figure of a blind poet, who can no longer view the prospect of youth and
beauty, and has laid his lyre down useless at his side. Despite the general acclamation with
which Le Soir was received, Delecluze for one felt the presence of this surrogate and failed spec-
tator to be a blemish in the work, since the public had no need of such a mediator.*°
This example suggests one of the factors that Delaroche may have taken into account in elab-
orating the composition of the large painting. The lyre is there, not as the poetic appurtenance
of Sappho, but as the index of the presence of an onlooker, who (like Gleyre’s blind poet) can no
longer participate in the scene before our eyes. It seems to have passed unnoticed in the scanty
discussion of the work that the lyre is clearly fitted out with a black mourning-band on its right-
hand lower side. This surely clinches the point that it signals, not the poetic powers of Sappho,
but the impotence of the artist in coming to terms with the radically changed biographical
context of his subject-matter.
Yet Delaroche may well have had a classical theme in mind when he determined to continue
to work on the large composition after his wife’s death. If the lyre is the instrument of the artist,
it could also be seen as the lyre with which Orpheus charmed the birds and the beasts, but could
not succeed in bringing Eurydice back from the dead. Clement, Gleyre’s biographer, tells us
that one of the two occasions on which he saw the painter weep was at a performance of
Gluck’s Orpheus, precisely when the hero tried desperately to recall the vanishing Eurydice
with his lyre. If Delaroche conceived the idea of portraying his former wife as Eurydice,
looking askance at him from beyond the grave, it is not surprising that he finally decided to
abandon the limited possibility of resurrection afforded by his hand and brush.

* * *

Delaroche’s portraits of Napoleon form a second connective strand in the work of his later
years, in this case extending from 1838 to the final paintings of the 1850s. As with the previous
sequence traced here, they represent a consecutive discourse, which is at the same time satu-
rated with additional implications. On one level, they present the clearest signs of the market-

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ability of Delaroche’s work on an international scale. Such images of Napoleon appealed to the
aristocracy and the wealthy merchant classes, not to mention the monarchs, of mid-century
Europe: Delaroche’s willingness to make replicas and reduced versions of these fashionable
icons Was an important factor in safeguarding his income, while he maintained his policy of
not showing at the Paris Salon. But, at the same time, it is undeniable that the preoccupation
with the image of Napoleon betokened Delaroche’s own intimate concern with self-identity. It
will be possible to argue that, in the virtual absence of any self-portraits worthy of the name,
Delaroche’s Napoleonic images assume the burden of self-expression. This is yet a further di-
mension of Delaroche’s art, which combines the representation of history with the mapping out
ofa personal space.
For this overdetermination of meanings to be possible, Delaroche had to be working at a
particular stage in the development of the Napoleonic legend and of the Romantic culture
that espoused it. It would of course be a gross exaggeration to state that Delaroche began to
paint Napoleon when the figure of the Emperor had lost all immediate relevance to contempo-
rary politics. But it is plausible to argue that the circumstances of the July Monarchy created the
temporary illusion that Napoleon’s legacy was safely sealed. When Delaroche’s friend Charles
de Remusat moved the proposal for the solemn repatriation of Napoleon’s ashes in 1840, he
created an immediate sensation in a Chambre des Deputes which was not at all prepared for
such an initiative, and a consequent furore in the press. Artists were not immune to such re-
kindled interest, and Ary Scheffer had to be dissuaded from joining the official boat party to
Saint Helena, on the ground that this would give him an unfair advantage over his fellows.
But this was, in Remusat’s estimation, not in any sense a sign that imperial sentiment was
only waiting to be revived by such a measure. It was the failure of the republican revolution of
1848, in his view, that was uniquely responsible for the dramatic improvement of the prospects
of the Emperor’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, and the consequent foundation of the Second
Empire.>!
It is possible to argue, therefore, that the figure of Napoleon provided Delaroche with a
symbol which had apparently all but vanished from the language of contemporary politics,
while retaining immense potentiality on the level of representation. The return of the ashes
from Saint Helena was to be, in a real sense, the acknowledged end of the period of
mourning, in which the Emperor’s titanic achievement could not easily be separated from the
messy political legacy that he had bequeathed to Restoration France. But already, two years
before Remusat’s proposal, Delaroche had started the task of marking the end of mourning by
a revisionist portrait study, which drew on existing and celebrated imagery while at the same
time transposing it. His Napoleon was to be, first and foremost, a work which acknowledged
the priority of the great artists who had been the Emperor’s contemporaries. But it was also to
be an almost archaeological reconstruction, extracting its data from carefully assembled docu-
ments, which had already acquired the patina of history.
‘This combination of qualities was brought together, literally to order, in the commission that
Delaroche completed in 1838 for the Dowager Countess of Sandwich: Napoleon in his Study
(illus. 150). The Countess had already been a widow for twenty years at the time, and had set

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 JED OUD Ye ARMY. “AUN De Ont Et ERS

up a magnificent establishment on the corner of the Rue Saint-Florentin and the Rue de Rivoli,
in a house formerly inhabited by Talleyrand. In her youth, as Lady Louisa Lowry-Corry, she
had spent much of her time in the company of her aunt, who was married to the English
foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh, and progressively acquired portraits of herself by
Lawrence and Hamilton as well as a bust by Canova.** As her second daughter, Catherine
Caroline, had married Count Alexander Walewski — a natural son of Napoleon — in 1831, the
Countess was well placed not only to commission this ‘souvenir’ portrait of the Emperor but
also to attest to the accuracy of its appurtenances. Godde quotes the ‘inscription’ placed
behind the canvas:

This portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, was painted for me by Paul Delaroche, im
souvenir, 1n the year 1837.
The uniform of the old guard was lent by Baron Marchant, the Emperor’s valet de chambre; the
sword is the one that Napoleon carried at Waterloo . . .
The furniture is what existed in the Emperor’s study in the Tuileries.
The snuff-box, ornamented with two medallions fixed on the cover, is the one which he gave to the
Comte de Flahaut.>+
 PAUL DELDAROGHE

Nothing could indicate more effectively than this little inventory the essentially archaeological
aspect of Delaroche’s work —down to the snuff-box, which can only just be discerned in the
Emperor’s hands, clutched behind his back, and of course vanished, in company with most of
the other historical details, when the work served for an engraving in reduced format by
Freeman (illus. 151). Delaroche, however, has been mindful of a particular prototype in
finding a way to unify these heterogeneous properties: the painting of Napoleon in lus Study
carried out by David in 1812, to the commission of Alexander Douglas, later roth Duke of
Hamilton (National Gallery, Washington). Himself coming belatedly to the task of furnishing
such images for the British aristocracy, he has taken into account one ofthe first and foremost

151 Napoleon in his Study, engraving by Samuel Freeman.

examples: the comparable attention to the orders on the Emperor’s lapel indeed suggests that he
has closely studied the sole replica of the work made by David.*+ However, Delaroche has
wholly altered the mood and effect of the portrait by David, by the simple expedient of
turning Napoleon’s body by a few degrees, and giving him a disquieting, sidelong glance. ‘This
gives the Emperor’s image a dimension of interiority which is hardly present in the competent
bureaucrat of David’s portrait.
Delaroche may well have found the source for this sidelong glance close to home, in the large
painting of the Battle ofIena, which was one of Horace Vernet’s contributions to the Galerie des
Batailles at the Chateau de Versailles. Completed in 1836, this work varies the formula of
showing the Emperor riding towards the spectator, or parallel with the picture plane, and has
him looking back over his shoulder at the assembled troops. However Vernet’s Napoleon has
something to look at, and the variation scarcely inflects the Emperor’s face with any special psy-
chological nuance. In the case of Delaroche’s work, however, the glance is directed beyond the

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 1 Ee OY oR AVi Lay AN DO ME ERS

spectator’s shoulder: it is a ‘lost glance’, as found typically in the Dutch genre pictures of Gerard
Ter Borch, and its effect cannot fail to be disquieting. While the vast majority of the official
images produced at the time of the Empire show Napoleon unflinchingly confronting the spec-
tator, this averted half-profile sets the pattern for Delaroche’s very different series of portraits:
absorptive rather than theatrical, and affected with a contagious unease.
Already at this early stage in the series, however, there is a leakage between the Napoleonic
image and the image of the artist’s self. It is difficult to estimate precisely when, in Delaroche’s
career, it became customary to compare his features to those of Napoleon. David d’Angers, who
produced his portrait medallion of Delaroche in 1832, gives a rapid and slightly sardonic de-
scription of his entry to the Institut that year, as its youngest ever elected artist, which
suggests an imperious temperament, to say the least: ‘{Delaroche] stamps his foot and looks at
everyone with an air which seems to say, “I know the difficulty which preoccupies you; I will
look after all that.” > But the medallion, being in profile, and showing ample side-whiskers,
has nothing Napoleonic about it (illus. 1). André Lemoisne, the biographer of Eugene Lami,
refers to the presence in one of Lami’s society paintings of around 1840 of ‘Paul Delaroche,
with his fine and sad Napoleonic physiognomy’.° But it is not obvious how far Lemoisne was
repeating a long-standing view of Delaroche’s appearance. What can be said unequivocally,
however, is that in 1838, the year of the completion of Napoleon in his Study, Delaroche
executed virtually the only portrait of himself that has survived: in its mood, and its physiog-
nomic and capillary detail, this recalls irresistibly the image of Napoleon (illus. 135).
It would not be going too far to describe this haunting drawing ‘a deux crayons’ as the author-
ized image of Delaroche.*” It was the basis for a fine engraving by Aristide Louis, published by
Goupil, and seems to have largely determined the presentation of the artist in the portrait by a
Flemish pupil, Jean Portaels, which probably dates from the early 184os (illus. 152). Even the
comparatively relaxed image derived from a drawing by another young painter, Buttura, who
had been a pensionnaire at the Villa Medicis and perhaps met Delaroche in those privileged sur-
roundings, maintains the raked strand of hair shown in the drawing of 1838: in this case,
however, the print of 1853 has reversed its direction (illus. 2). Mirecourt’s study of Delaroche
for the series of ‘Portraits and Silhouettes in the Nineteenth Century’, first published in the year
of the painter’s death, reduces the image almost to a hieroglyph (illus. 153).
It is easier to identify the visual link between representations of Napoleon (including Dela-
roche’s own) and the official image of the painter than it is to gauge the possible significance of
this connection. As was noted in the first chapter, the career of the Emperor could not fail to be
a powerful if disorientating factor in the early development of a Frenchman of his generation.
Delaroche’s first eighteen years coincided exactly with his rise to power and his ultimate humil-
iation on the French scene. By the late 1830s, however, Delaroche and those of his contempo-
raries who had avoided the disastrous fate of the fictional Julien Sorel could look back on their
own careers as well under way, if not completed; they could also look back on the life of
Napoleon as occupying a historical period, right up to the last years at Saint Helena, and at
least temporarily dissociated (if we are to believe Remusat) from the contemporary issues of
France. It is very likely, in these circumstances, that Delaroche saw in Napoleon a composite

[249 |
 PAU TL DE AR OG EEE

4;
3
i.
a

152 Jean Portaels, Portrait of Paul Delaroche, c. 1850, oil on canvas.

HISTOIRE CONTEMPORAINE
Portraits et Silhouelics aa XIX* sidele.

DELAROCHE
DECAMPS
yan

EUGENE DE MIRECOURT

119
TROISIEME EDITION

PARIS
WL LA WOO UT LIBRAIRIE DES CONT
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Et chez tous les libraires de Fr

1871
Tous droits

153 Title page from Eugene de Mirecourt, Delaroche Decamps (1871).

 TEES Et ONY SE AGM Tiay SAINID Or
E ERS

symbol, incorporating both the model for youthful ambition and the trace of titanic failure.
Svetlana Alpers has convincingly argued that, in the later stages of Rubens’s career, the painter’s
sense of self is projected on to the figure of Silenus, who still keeps up his fleshly pursuits
though his body is sagging and growing old.>° For Delaroche, the equivalent of the bumbling
satyr would be the world-weary, travel-stained tyrant at the end of his tether.
This is the image recorded in Napoleon at Fontainebleau, undoubtedly the most successful of
the series (illus. 154). Delaroche’s slumped and brooding Emperor, shown in his palace on 31
March 1814 when the allied armies received the capitulation of Paris, has not yet had time to
remove his muddy boots and his spurs. His sword has been casually laid aside and his cocked
hat lies on the floor, to the right of his feet, while only the inadvertent drawing of a curtain
reveals the gilded splendour of the palatial setting. Once again, Delaroche was painting the
Emperor in a revisionist mode for the benefit of a foreign patron, the Leipzig merchant
Heinrich Schletter, who had commercial interests in France and was at this stage amassing the
best collection of works by contemporary artists in his native city. Delaroche was to complete
several additional versions of the painting over the next few years, mainly in a reduced format or
in half-length; possibly the first of these is the slightly reduced version held in the Musée de
PArmée, Paris.” However this general acceptability of the image, both in France and abroad,
is perhaps less interesting than its specific destiny in Leipzig. Schletter’s determination to
have the first version was echoed in his ambition for his collection as a whole. When he died in
1853, he left it to the city on the condition that a suitable home should be provided within five
years, and on 18 December 1858 the Leipzig Museum der Bildenden Kiinste was duly inaugu-
rated.°° The royal city of Dresden had already been the beneficiary of Napoleon’s munificence,
when he presented the King of Saxony with a copy of his official coronation portrait, by
Gérard." Leipzig gained this very different image of the Emperor, which held its own as a
focal point of the contemporary collection well into the present century, ranked high enough
among cultural treasures to be carried off by Russian troops after the Second World War, and
returned in triumph in 1958 only to be subsequently consigned to the store.
Delaroche’s sources for the work, both visual and literary, can be easily enumerated. Ziff il-
lustrates a wood-engraving by Raffet, dated 1839, which shows the scene at Fontainebleau but,
crucially, depicts the Emperor in company rather than on his own.” The return of Napoleon’s
ashes from Saint Helena, initiated in 1840, had prompted a large production of new commem-
orative imagery, such as the illustrations by Charlet to the new 1842 edition of the Memorial de
Sainte-Héléne.3 Delaroche had also had every opportunity to develop his interest in Napoleon
when, in 1842, he painted a fine portrait of General Bertrand, one of his most faithful servants
and companions in arms.°+ According to Godde, he had found valuable material about this
ultimate stage in the Emperor’s destiny in reading the Histoire de Napoléon published in 1828
by another imperial official, the Baron de Norvins.°> But all these contributory sources must
take second place to the pictorial achievement of Napoleon at Fontainebleau and its specific ge-
nealogy in Delaroche’s work. I have pointed out earlier the significance of the final image in the
Rousseau drawings (illus. 28), where Delaroche chooses to represent a moment of self-absorp-
tion by the church door: the young Rousseau, cast out of the benevolent company of Madame
 DE awRiO Gin

154 Napoleon at Fontainebleau, 1845, oil on canvas.

 PEE HE OwlyY FAM ELLY AND OTH ERS

Basile, awaits the figure of authority who will not come (and whose name he does not even
know). This absorptive mode develops a further intensification in Cromivell, where the guilt of
having cut off the legitimate authority is at least one component in the sombre attitude of the
Lord Protector. In Napoleon at Fontainebleau, Delaroche chooses a moment in the career of a
man who has both created and destroyed himself, rising above all pre-existing authority but
for that very reason uniquely aware of his own failure. As a Romantic rather than a classical
hero, he is portrayed not in action but in the expanded moment of self-consciousness that
follows and reflects upon action. But to this extent, the image becomes incorporated in a tradi-
tion, as much sculptural as pictorial, which has always sought to represent not the external
surfaces of the body but the inwardness of reflective thought. Werner Hofmann is right, in
this sense, to see Napoleon at Fontainebleau as anticipating Rodin’s The Thinker of 1880.°°
By these criteria, Delaroche’s next major painting involving Napoleon is a less impressive
achievement. Yet in other respects Napoleon Crossing the Alps represents the culmination of his
revisionist work on recent French history, undertaken for foreign clients and diffused in a
number of closely related versions. Indeed, the painting comes complete with an account,
which is unlikely to be entirely mythical, of its original commissioning. The 3rd Earl of
Onslow, an enthusiast like so many of his fellow peers for memorabilia connected with
Napoleon, records that he was visiting the Louvre one day in the 1840s with Delaroche when
he noticed David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps of 1801 (now kept at the Chateau de Malmaison)
and commented on its implausible theatricality. From this perception, the notion that Dela-
roche should paint a picture of the same event which would restore its historical verisimilitude
67 ‘ A 4 5
was naturally engendered. 7 "There has been confusion about the different versions which
derived from this initial commission, most of them being for English clients although one
appears to be the first painting by Delaroche to enter an American collection.”* The generally
acceptable view seems to be that the earliest signed version is the work now in the collection of
the Louvre, which remained in private hands until 1982: the version in Walker Art Gallery, Li-
verpool, which is reproduced here (illus. 136) and bears the inscription ‘Nice, 1850’, was the work
commissioned by the Earl of Onslow and perhaps delayed in its completion by the 1848 revolu-
tion. Differences in size between the two versions are so minute as to be unimportant. But De-
laroche has used the opportunity of the latter version in this case to refine the features of
Napoleon, to include more topographical detail in the alpine landscape, and to sharpen up the
figure of the horseman following from behind, who now sports a tricoloured cockade in his hat.
As has been pointed out, the interest of this subject for Delaroche was not confined to the
opportunity of revising David’s prototype. He appears to have made use of one of the recently
published illustrations of the event, itself dependent on new historical information, which was
Goes ; ; :
included in Thiers’s History ofthe Consulate (1845). 9 Godde certainly used this source to
identify the general conception of the scene, so different from the image of serenity on a wild
steed which Napoleon had extorted from David in 1801: in Thiers’s words, ‘he climbed the
Saint-Bernard, mounted on a mule, clothed in the envelope of grey which he always wore, led
by a guide from the country, displaying in the difficult passages the distraction of a mind
occupied elsewhere’.”° But Delaroche had himself been working, up to the years before he com-
 PAWL D EAR: OnGr:

pleted the first version, on his largest painting apart from the Hemuicycle: Charlemagne Crossing
the Alps. He could not have failed to notice the connection between this almost mythical journey
and the image that David was required to present of the alpine crossing of Napoleon in 1800,
since the name of Charlemagne, together with that of Hannibal, was inscribed by David upon a
prominent surface of rock. Delaroche’s own paintings vary in particular from the picturesque
landscape image offered by the illustration to Thiers by bringing the central equestrian figure
into the foreground, as he is in David, and by hemming him in with immense volumes of snow-
clad rock. On these surfaces, no message 1s inscribed.
Yet perhaps it is possible to derive a message, in line with the argument pursued here, from
these seemingly innocent surfaces of rock. One of the versions of Napoleon Crossing the Alps,

155 Napoleon at Saint Helena, c. 1855, wall drawing, originally in Delaroche’s Paris studio, since destroyed.
 TBE BUOY VE AyMOIIOY AN DOH BRS

roughly quarter-size compared with the Onslow and Naylor versions, went to the collection of
Queen Victoria, and Delaroche followed this up in 1852 by painting for her a similarly small-
scale Napoleon at Saint Helena, which was to be the prototype for an immense and significant
further project.”” As Godde relates, he decided that the composition warranted ‘very large di-
mensions’ and ‘traced it out with charcoal on the walls of his studio in the same proportions as
he was projecting’.”~ Destined inevitably to be ‘ephemeral’, as Goddé recognized, this extraor-
dinary work was nonetheless saved from oblivion after Delaroche’s death by the pioneering
photographic skills of Bingham, which enabled it to be reproduced and published in the retro-
spective catalogue of 1857 (illus. 148).
In contrast to the previous three images of Napoleon, this portrait does not appear to have
any obvious source in the existing iconography. Charlet’s illustrations to the Mémorial de Sainte-
Helene, mentioned above, show the exiled Emperor out of doors, in the pleasant woodland
scenery mentioned by Las Cases.” But they do not hint at the inherently improbable circum-
stance that he might be found meditating among the rocks. It is likely, however, that Delaroche
drew his concept of the scenery of the island from a reliable source: the general view published
in an early edition of the Memorial shows impressive rock formations around the well-protected
harbour, which may well have been adapted, with some disregard for scale, in this bold compo-
sition (illus. 156). He certainly painted a small study of Rocks in 1853 (now lost), which may have
been a stage in the adaptation.”* But the plausibility and the topographical accuracy of Dela-
roche’s final image of Napoleon must of course be weighed against the fact that in this work

VUE DE LISLE DES? HELENE.

2. Mauron du Gounernement..2.lEghiwe. 3. la Halle et la laxerne. 4 Batterw gut commande laVille et la Rade \ leFort. 6 Balterus gu defendent
Lentree de la Rade

156 View of the Island ofSaint Helena, from the Comte de Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Helene.
 PAUL DE LAR
OG EE

57Napoleon
157 Napol at t Saint
Saint HelHelena,c. 1855,
855, washwashdrawing drawing
withwith ink
ink.

he was attempting his last and most unequivocal identification of himself with the Emperor.
The ‘Rock’, which he had determined to capitalize in his own signature and objectified in
such different contexts as the 1821 lithograph, the Samt Amelia and the Charlemagne, not to
mention the recent Napoleon Crossing the Alps, is here welded into unity with the reflective
figure chosen to carry the weight of his self-identification. In a spectacular wash drawing
(illus. 157), Delaroche indeed all but cancels the well-known physiognomy, with its tell-tale
quiff. The Rock itself has acquired the character of a heroic body.

x # *

In 1890, Maurice Denis took time off in the manifesto, in which he proclaimed a picture to be
‘essentially a plane surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’, to lambast the
works of Ernest Meissonier. Meissonier’s reputation was based, in his view, on a number of
factors that pleased the vulgar crowd: his way of adapting ‘intimate’ Dutch genre scenes, his
clever execution, which made the crowd exclaim ‘C’est fort, and above all his literary

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 PE ESE OY AM Ti AyN DY OL EULER'S

emphasis: “The literary spirit in abundance (the features of Napoleon, to us grotesque, are close
to the sublime for the majority)’.” It is interesting, if ironic, to note that the artist who had been,
for such critics as Gautier and James, the paradigm of painterliness was now being stripped of
his credibility by a determined Modernist. The criteria first used to discriminate Meissonier’s
battle scenes and figures of Napoleon from those of Delaroche and Vernet were being employed
to relegate him from serious attention.
Yet there is a further point to be made, in relation to Denis’s argument that ‘the features of
Napoleon’ have become a facile way of evoking the ‘sublime’. Meissonier was born in 1815, and
his most notable works involving the Emperor were produced in the decade following Delaro-
che’s death. In Napoleon in 1814 (Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore), he has clearly and resource-
fully adapted the strategies of Delaroche, especially in Napoleon at Fontainebleau, to a dazzlingly
effective outdoor scene. John Ruskin, who once owned the picture, must have thought it worth
its price for the clouds alone. From our own point of view, it is difficult to disagree with the
judgement of Marc Gotlieb, who sees it as an ‘absorptive picture’ in which the Emperor ‘effec-
tively neutralized the beholder’s presence through the global reach and power [of] his gaze’.”°
But if Denis’s sublimity on the cheap can plausibly be redescribed as a vehicle for absorptive
effects — in Delaroche as much as in Meissonier — there remains still a further need to draw a
broad distinction between Delaroche and his brilliant successor, in terms which completely
eluded the critics of the period. The projection of his own sense of identity and of his
evolving career as an artist on to the retrospective saga of Napoleon’s life gives Delaroche’s
work in this area a unique generational character: suspended between Gros, the exemplary
artist of the First Empire, and Meissonier, his popular equivalent for the Second, Delaroche
offers a fractured discourse of sublimity in which his own sense of failure and dejection threa-
tens always to have the last word.
If the vast charcoal drawing on the studio wall had been Delaroche’s only legacy from the last
years of his life, we would indeed be forced to take this mood as being the dominant one, and
conclude this study on a muted note. Throughout this chapter, I have been insisting on the
coherent and directed character of Delaroche’s investigations at this later stage, when the
decision not to show at the Salon and the ready availability of private patrons allowed him to
plough his own furrow and operate on the fluctuating borderline between personal and public
themes. But clearly the directions that I have so far analyzed did not provide a formula for limit-
less development and innovation. The concern with the notion of the ‘Holy Family’, drawing
both on his personal domestic life and on the idealization of maternity in the Renaissance tradi-
tion, could not long outlast the death of his wife and the maturation of his two sons. The Na-
poleonic alibi, so remarkably useful as a source of patronage and as a vehicle for self-reflection,
was bound to induce and accentuate Delaroche’s endemic melancholia once the narcissistic
element (as in the studio wall drawing) became uncomfortably prominent.
There is in fact evidence to show that, in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, Delaroche was
close to losing his sense of direction. The illness of his eldest son, and no doubt his own, obliged
him to spend a large part of the year in Nice. There he spent much time copying and reworking
earlier themes. His friend Henri Decaisne was indeed being tactful when he wrote to Delaroche
 PAU LD EAR
O: Grin

at Nice on 12 February 1849 that he immensely admired the replica of Crommell commissioned
by Goupil — evidently painted with no access to the original in Delaroche’s Nice studio. ‘It is
marvellous that you can use your isolation in this way, but I will praise God the day when you
are back in your studio and able to devote yourselftoyour new works.’”” A little over a year later,
Delaroche’s devoted ex-pupil Hébert had to use all his tact, and more than a little flattery, in
conveying his doubts about an allegorical composition of Charity, on which he was asked to
comment. Evidently Delaroche had decided to allegorize the familiar motif of a mother and
her children, but Hébert found Charity not ‘sufficiently expressive’ and the children ‘chilling
in their symmetry’. It was necessary for him to remind his master that he was ‘the man who
knew how to cause emotion by profound observation of concentrated drama and veiled
terror’: he was the artist of Jane Grey, the Princes in the Tower and the Duc de Guise, ‘perhaps
the masterpiece of modern times’”*
Delaroche seems to have taken the hint, and relinquished the allegorical for the historical
mode, which had so effectively sustained him in his early years. From around 1851 dates an im-
portant series of works relating to the history of the French Revolution, in particular the fate of
Marie Antoinette, which concludes with the eloquent painting of the Girondins on which De-
laroche is engaged in Roux’s depiction of the Paris studio around 1855 (illus. 142).’”? These
works certainly did not harm Delaroche’s reputation at the time, and the assiduity of Goupil
in finding outstanding printmakers to reproduce and diffuse them assured him ofan increased
measure of fame after his death. But the recourse to a historical period that was more recent and
increasingly well documented could not fail to foreground the ‘legendary’ element in Delaro-
che’s representation of the past.*° The destiny of this part of Delaroche’s work was to become
assimilated with the general mass of images, fictions and popular histories proliferating around
the French Revolution. Vincent van Gogh, familiar as he must have been with the Delaroche
legacy through his brother’s connection to the Maison Goupil, saw this part of his production
in precisely these terms.”!
How then, if at all, did Delaroche match the radical achievement of the earlier decades in this
last phase of his life? Henri Delaborde was in little doubt that he had done so. But it was by
taking a surprising swerve in subject-matter, and also by departing significantly from his early
intellectual position, that he had managed the feat. In Delaborde’s own words:
When he was simply the painter of the [Princes in the Tower| and of Crommell, he probably did not an-
ticipate that a day would come when his soul would be open to inspirations of another order; that his
hand so attentive, at the outset, to palpable truth, would lovingly trace the image of higher truths; that
in the end the Young Martyr and the four subjects of the History ofthe Virgin would come admirably to
refute the principles which guided him then.*”

Delaborde is here understandably anxious to draw a firm distinction between the early and the
late phases of Delaroche’s career. Knowing Delaroche as well as he did from around 1830, he
must have been able to measure the distance travelled from that period when the painter had
proclaimed that ‘the harvest is over’ and the ‘analysis of purely human events’ was the only path
for the contemporary artist.”$ But it is hardly necessary to point out that this estimate obscures
the continuities in Delaroche’s intellectual and artistic development. I made the case, in

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 THR HOLY BAM IL Y AN DONDE ERS

Chapter II, that the main lines of his work over the first fifteen years could be seen as having
been determined by ‘repetition-structures’ derived from post-Renaissance religious art. To
that extent, his own explicit advocacy of a secular position was at odds with the language that
forced its way, inevitably, through the historical subject-matter. It should not have come as a
surprise to anyone that the painter who produced Jane Grey in 1834 should have gone on to
complete the Young Christian Martyr two decades later.
This is, however, a somewhat simplified characterization of Delaroche’s position, and needs
some modification. If he undoubtedly proceeded in his later years to the direct representation
of biblical subjects, which, in earlier years, he had left behind, this was not because he had
reverted to a direct, uncomplicated view of religious art. On the contrary, it was in part
because the religious reference had itself become humanized, in the discourse of his contem-
poraries. It was possible to convey by the modern treatment of sacred themes a message that
exceeded, and occasionally transgressed, the doctrinal positions of organized religion. Alfred
de Vigny, Delaroche’s literary reference for Cardinal Richelieu and a friend since the 1830s, epit-
omized this tendency with his celebrated poem “The Mount of Olives’, written around 18309,
published for the first time in 1843 and supplemented with an agnostic postscript in 1862.” It
mattered a great deal to Vigny whether Christ should be portrayed as God made Man, or as
Man becoming God — in other words, whether the focus should be on his incarnation or on
his agony. Delaroche was not the only painter to record ‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’ in this
spirit. But he was perhaps the painter who most resourcefully sought the pictorial means for
such a transformation.
In effect, there is no compelling reason for seeking to situate Delaroche’s late religious paint-
ings only with reference to the degree of his Catholic devoutness at this stage of his life. The
basic point is that he had come to see historical and political questions as functions of a wider
evolutionary scheme, for which the vocabulary of religious thinking offered the only unifying
concepts. Writing to Delaborde in 1848, during the revolutionary period, he exclaimed: ‘Poor
France. . . !Shall we now have the daring to boast of our civilization since Saint Bartholomew’s
day. God has wished to punish us in what we hold most dear, our insatiable pride — Ler us
humble ourselves)? In this reading of history, religious strife and intolerance serve as the model
for all varieties of civil strife and intolerance. But there is still reason to endorse a traditional
religious message: Let us humble ourselves. It was Delaroche’s last task to apply this guiding prin-
ciple, almost literally, in the creation of a series of small-scale paintings, which eschewed the
dramatic historical apparatus of his Salon works, yet retained all the ingenuity of composition
that he had developed in the course of his panoramic schemes. Elaborating these paintings, he
went further than ever before in reflecting on the status of his art and its continued viability in
the age of mechanical reproduction of which he was a privileged witness.
‘Two sets of works involving specifically religious motifs are especially important if we wish to
trace this intimate connection between a humanistic revision of Christian iconography and a
renewed commitment to radical effects of technique. As early as 1846, in the year following his
wife’s death, Delaroche completed his tiny but harrowing Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane
(illus. 158). Painted (like the two small contemporary fond: in the Wallace Collection) on a
 PAUL DE LAR OGHE

158 Christin the Garden ofGethsemane, 1846, oil on panel.

wooden panel, this image of desolation faithfully anticipates a series bearing a title more directly
reminiscent of Vigny, Christ on the Mount ofOlives, which extends from 1852 to 1855.°° To the
latter date must be ascribed the largest work in the series, which was included among the sup-
plementary paintings in the retrospective exhibition of 1857 and illustrated in Godde’s catalogue
raisonné (illus. 159). But it is one of the smaller versions, probably the painting dating from 1852,
that Gautier discusses in favourable and significant terms when he returns to the subject of De-
laroche’s work three years after his generally dismissive article of 1857:
The Christ in the Garden of Olives, though it measures hardly a few centimetres, has the unction, gravity
and style of a history painting large enough to cover a patch of wall. Christ, pallid and in a state of
collapse, sweating the sweat of moral agony, has fallen on his knees before a mound. ‘A mystic host
proceeding from the holy ciborium illuminates his face grown pale through supreme struggle. This
supernatural light is the only one that lights the scene, and the celestial victim bends his head at the
A Aha = Py 85
sight of this symbol of the agreed sacrifice.”

260|
 DEE OW Y EAI iy AUN DOT
H ERS

159 Christ on the Mount ofOlives, 1855, oil on canvas.

Gautier is certainly discussing a variant picture, rather than a smaller but identical version.
Instead of a‘mound’ (¢ertre), what we notice in the work illustrated is a fresh occurrence of De-
laroche’s rock. The host is not the light source, and all the illumination is provided by the glow
(one cannot strictly call it a halo) around Christ’s head. But it is easy enough to conclude from
the existing reproduction what Gautier must have found exciting about the related small work —
precisely the fact that the light is generated internally without regard to the normal conventions
for the distribution of ambient chiaroscuro. As early as Mademoiselle de Maupin (the novel in

[261]
 PAUL DED WRIOG EE

which he ridiculed the popularity of Delaroche), Gautier was negotiating his own sophisticated
synthesis between art and religion, which involved an appropriation of the language of mysti-
cism to enshrine the autonomy of art. The hero of the novel pictures himself at one point as
being ‘like Adam at the foot of the walls of the earthly paradise . . . seeing the sparkle through
the cracks in the door of a light stronger than the sun’. It is not surprising that the self-gener-
ated light of Delaroche’s painting should have impressed him and caused him to evaluate it
more in accordance with the symbolist doctrine of the autonomy of art than with the earlier
standards that he had applied to Delaroche.
Yet the work that most fully exemplifies this direction in Delaroche’s final period, and
enables us to extend further the implications of his proto-symbolism, is the Young Christian
Martyr. As with the Mount of Olives series, this is the final large version of a series begun
about two years before (illus. 137): it can be seen, behind the Girondins, in Roux’s studio scene
(illus. 142). In effect, none of his works was more circumstantially documented than this project,
which Delaroche proclaimed from the outset to be ‘the most sad and the most holy of all my
compositions’? Ina letter dated January 1854, he represented the subject as having occurred to
him during a period of fever, and wrote of his first sketch as having been made ‘yesterday, in
charcoal, on a small sheet of blue paper’.?° This subject remained constant, and an extract
defining it from Delaroche’s original letter was finally reproduced in the 1857 catalogue:
A young Roman girl, not wishing to sacrifice to the false gods, is condemned to death and thrown into
the Tiber, with bound hands; the sun is set behind the sombre and denuded banks of the river; two
Christians, who are silently on their way, notice the corpse of the young martyr, which passes by
them caught up by the waters.”

Delaroche’s invaluable letter also lets slip the self-doubt that oppressed him, even in such a pro-
musing project. He confesses that he would have ‘as always, hidden the sketch away, if |Eugene
Lami] had not told me that it was destined to produce an effect’. He apologized for the inade-
quacy of his description, but dared to hope that his correspondent would, on seeing the sketch,
find ‘the painter. . . less mediocre than the writer’.””
Of course Delaroche was right in putting his trust in the originality of the pictorial concept.
Scenes of early Christian martyrdom were certainly not unknown at the time. Indeed they seem
to have enjoyed a certain vogue in the mid-1850s, anticipated by such works as Victor Schnetz’s
Funeral of a Young Martyr, which was shown at the Salon of 1848 (Musée des Beaux-Arts,
Nantes). As has been made clear in my earlier argument, Delaroche himself did not have to be
initiated into the theme of martyrdom, which was one of the guiding motifs of his work in the
1830s. He may indeed have gleaned from recent Salon exhibitions the idea that a Roman
version of the theme was opportune. But the chief interest of the subject that came to him on
his sick-bed must have resided in the challenge it presented to his new mode of religious
painting. He could treat it as a study in the self-generation of a source of light, transcendental
in its reference but in plastic terms constituting the autonomy of the picture. Gautier, who in
his 1857 text was still not quite ready to relinquish his view of Delaroche as the crude populist,
yet recognized the nub of the matter: ‘this pale head, lit by its halo, glimmers with a Corre-
gesque grace’.”

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 PE AOLY PAMIEY AND OTHERS

44 Fee
24
L
4
f
ri

160 Study for Young Christian Martyr,

c. 1855, pencil drawing.

161 Study for Young Christian Martyr (Onlookers),

c. 1855, pencil drawing.

Gautier’s change of heart, originally prompted by considerable surprise at seeing the work at
Goupil’s, where it awaited engraving, testifies to the originality of Delaroche’s conception.
Although comparisons were made at the time between the Young Christian Martyr and the
Ophelia of the young Pre-Raphaelite artist Millais, painted in 1852 (Tate Gallery, London),
the exercise can only serve to show up the profound differences, in all but the most trivial
respects.”* Where Millais relentlessly particularizes — so minutely as to allow Ruskin to make
his famous inventory of plant life in defence of the picture — Delaroche subordinates all detail to
the fluctuating intensities of the light produced by the halo. Even the exquisite pencil sketch,
which cannot reproduce this light effect, yet bleaches out the face as if in anticipation, while
projecting the flow of the gauzy clothing in the current of the river (illus. 160). Indeed, Dela-
roche appears to have done all that is compatible with retaining a vestige of natural landscape to
intensify the luminosity that proceeds from the halo. The sun has set in the background. The
two Christian witnesses, developed in a further sketch (illus. 161), bar a good proportion of the
sky while remaining opaque and shadowy. The colour range is reduced to a scale of pale white,
cream and opalescent green, with the gold ofthe halo picked up in reflection on the crests of the
ripples.
The plastic use that Delaroche makes of the halo has few parallels in his own work or in that
of his contemporaries. There is an almost imperceptible halo above the head of the Virgin in the
Desert (illus. 133), but only the light effects of the Mount ofOlives series genuinely anticipate the
shift from ambient lighting to the internal, autonomous source. One need only look at the steel

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 PAULID ELAR
O GEE

utility model —quite incapable of generating light — with which Ingres canonizes his Joan of Arc
at the Coronation of King Charles VII in Rheims (illus. 162) to recognize the new potential of De-
laroche’s conception. And yet the development that he seems to foreshadow comes into its own
no less than thirty years later, when Impressionism has been and gone, and Maurice Denis
begins to use the halo as a means of counteracting natural light with a luminous source which
is, by then, identified with the presence of flat colour planes on the surface.”* Denis, by invoking
the tradition of the Byzantine icon, enables us to see a convergence between Modernist dogma
and the devices of religious painting, which was not, of course, apprehensible to Delaroche.

162 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Joan of Arc at the Coronation of

King Charles VII in Rheims, 1851.

Yet there is a further, more contemporary dimension to Delaroche’s achievement in this late
picture and in those allied to it. Delaroche may never have made the remark so universally
: : —— , 6
credited to him: ‘From today painting is dead?” But the myth surrounding his reactions to
Daguerre’s new invention in 1839 is based, however indirectly, on the hard fact that he
compiled the official report for Arago on the artistic significance of the daguerreotype.”’ Dela-
roche sought to prove in his statement that ‘Daguerre’s process . . . completely satisfies all the
requirements of Art, and carries so far the perfection of certain of its essential conditions that it
will become even for the most skilful painters a subject of observation and study.®” In contrast
to his reported remark, he appears to be envisaging a future in which painters will continue to
paint, though they may well have their work facilitated by photography. But there is at least one
sentence — omitted from Arago’s version — that gives cause for further thought, as the phenom-
enon must have given cause for reflection to Delaroche himself. ‘Colour is translated [in the

[264 |
 PH HOLY BAMILY AND OTHER'S

daguerreotype process] with such truthfulness than one forgets its absence’? If the automatic
registration of light on a reflective surface can produce such truthfulness of effect that the paint-
er’s essential medium is bypassed, what future is there for the colorists? The rhetorical question
can, however, be put the other way round. Iflight can create ‘colour’ simply through the fidelity
of tonal nuance, then why should the painter not aspire to a restrained yet vivid unity of tone,
comparable to the black-and-white range of the daguerreotype?
Neither of these questions may represent the form in which Delaroche thought about the
implications of photography. But the fact remains that he moved, in his later paintings, in the
direction of the type of pictorial image that was comparable to — and could be satisfactorily re-
produced by — photography. Bingham’s extensive photographic survey of his work demon-
strates the point: for the earlier paintings, such as Jane Grey, the photograph is a very
imperfect notation, but for the Young Christian Martyr, it provides almost a replica of the scale
of tonal values as perceived in the painting. There is evidence, indeed, that Delaroche pressed
his concern with the nature of automatic reproduction to the point of reviewing the heritage of
works ‘not made with hands’ in Christian iconography. A drawing exists for a Saint Veronica,
which must relate to the painting ascribed in the Delaroche sale catalogue to 1847 (illus.
163).-° In it, the dishevelled saint displays the cloth with the miraculous imprint of Christ’s
face to an adoring crowd. Far more radical, however, is the second version of the theme, from
the last year of his life, in which Saint Veronica prostrates herself before the emblazoned cloth,
which casts its light on the envelope of her evacuated body (illus. 138).
Indeed, Delaroche’s Saint Veronica and the fine drawing that anticipates this final version
(illus. 164) prompt far-reaching questions, not only about the overall direction of Delaroche’s
career but also about the historical significance of his distinctive use of light and shade. In the
drawing, swiftly drawn soft pencil lines in Delaroche’s freest manner hint at the presence of a
supine body clinging to the floor: the enigma of the downward corporeal pressure dissimulated
by folds of clothing, so floridly displayed in the Death ofElizabeth, is expressed as a gesture of
ultimate humility. But the relation between the saint’s head, reduced to a vacant oval, and the
face of Christ, which radiates from the cloth, cannot be adequately defined in plastic terms by
the medium. The oil painting, on the other hand, makes the relation entirely clear, and at the
same time wholly mysterious. It is the face of Christ, turned so as almost to face the spectator,
that constitutes virtually the entire light source within the picture: it casts dark shadows on the
floor below the draperies and the extremities of the saint’s body, while leaving her face in semi-
obscurity. The contrasting blue and yellow of the draperies, and indeed all the colour effects
within this closely aligned tonal range, are subordinated to this unequivocal distribution of
light and shadow. Only on the cloth itself is it possible to pick out the traces of acomplementary
pigment, which is the faint marking of blood-red in the face of Christ.
Michael Baxandall has recently written with great insight about the treatment of shadows
during the Enlightenment. He chooses as his leading example Pierre Subleyras’s Charon
(Louvre), in which the naked ferryman with his splendidly modelled back stands between two
cowled figures to be transported into the nether world: not a sign of their bodies is vouchsafed,
but, in Baxandall’s words, ‘presumably we postulate that within the fabric are human figures,

[265|
 PAUL DELAROCHE

Sh aM
Hs
|
a

163 Study for Saint Veronica, 1847, ink drawing.

f '
ih
i

oHi oni
-_ r %
\ sus =
Wena oe eee i
+ SAS ; Ah aE ee pm
‘ i > pees Ta CRUE
J\agai ese renn RT

164 Study for Saint Veronica, c. 1856, pencil drawing.

|266|
 Tenet OY SP AWvial iy SANG DOT EsRIS

and from the forms of the fabric represented by the pictorial modelling, and also out of our
knowledge of likely and possible attitudes of human figures, we come to an adequate sense of
how the two are sitting’."°' This is a perfectly fair inference, because (as Baxandall explains) the
treatment of shadows in the eighteenth century reflects an advanced scientific knowledge of the
phenomenon of interrupted light. Faced with an irrational postulate — the physicality of the
soul in transit to Hades — the painter works all the more intensively to construct the conditions
of regular vision. But in the case of Delaroche’s Saint Veronica, the system seems to operate in
the reverse direction. Delaroche, trained in the academic tradition, was conversant with ways of
representing the human form under draperies or showing the shadows deriving from different
light sources in a homogeneous pictorial space. But here he has employed the knowledge pre-
cisely in order to evacuate the solid corporeality of the body and to enshrine the primacy of a
non-terrestrial source of light. It is worth pointing out that even pre-eighteenth-century repre-
sentation of the Veronica, intended specifically for devotional use, show the cloth subject to the
ordinary conditions of ambient light: Zurbaran’s famous Holy Face (Veronica) (Nationalmu-
seum, Stockholm) displays it as if in trompe-loeil, with deep shadows in the folds around
Christ’s face, produced by an implied light source outside the picture.'°* Delaroche has, by
contrast, arranged the space in such a way that no natural light can possibly detract from the
incandescence of the holy image.
It remains to be asked, however, if Delaroche would have made this singular intervention in
the history of religious art if he had not witnessed the ‘death of painting’, in the form of the birth
of photography. Georges Didi-Huberman has looked at the circumstances under which the
Turin Shroud, relatively understudied until the end of the nineteenth century, suddenly
acquired notoriety when a photographic study revealed the possibility that it was a ‘negative
imprint of the body of Christ’.'°5 The availability of photographic technology established the
epistemological conditions under which the image’s claim to truth as a representation could
be dramatically reassessed. I would suggest that there is a similar convergence, in Delaroche’s
late religious works, between his contemporary awareness of a process, which fixed the fugitive
effects of light, and his choice of traditional religious themes in which the indexical status of the
image was brought to the fore. The daguerreotype was not the miraculous cloth of Saint
Veronica, certainly, but it possessed the analogous property of creating a discontinuity in the
ordinary conditions of visibility. The painter’s representation of space had previously concen-
trated on a simulation of the conditions of natural vision, which therefore mimed the effects of
light and shade in the ambient world. But the shimmering surface of the daguerreotype offered
this reconstruction, not in the form of a carefully prepared study, but in the form of a faithful
trace — which did not have to follow the laborious process of being brought into being by
human labour. It is easy to imagine how, especially for the first generation who witnessed such
objects, the early photographs would have exerted a power strictly analogous, in perceptual
terms, to the power traditionally possessed by religious images ‘not made by hands’.
Yet this is not to deny that Delaroche’s late religious paintings were also, in a significant
sense, paintings with a religious message. They were in that sense a final expression of the
concern with giving traditional motifs and structures a contemporary significance, which had

[267 |
 PAU DE Lea ROG rn

dominated his life as an artist for over thirty years. But just as the prostrate Veronica differs in
almost every obvious respect from the dying Elizabeth, so the final series of works dealing with
the Life of the Virgin Mary radically scales down the painterly ambition implicit in Delaroche’s
earlier production, focusing almost exclusively on the resourceful use ofthe panoramic format.
Even in comparison with the Mount of Olives series and Saint Veronica, the first pair in this set of
works involving religious motifs implies a new level of synthesis between emotive subject-
matter and ingenious manipulation of the viewer’s reading of the represented space.
Delaroche began to work on the series of four small paintings in 1853, and all but one of the
four remained incomplete at his death three years later. Doubtless his mood at the beginning of
the period reflected his increasingly precarious state of health. In a letter to Delaborde dated 2
June 1853, he wrote from his studio in Nice of the ‘apathy’ into which he had fallen, but did not
conceal the fact that he was hard at work. ‘Apart from my painting I am lacking in energy, dis-
couraged and without much hope.’ In a pen sketch dated just over a month later, he neatly
encapsulated this not wholly unproductive situation. The lower figure must represent the artist
himself, but does so by way of an evident allusion to the precedent of Napoleon at Fontainebleau:
his hat, like Napoleon’s, has been flung on to the floor, and to the other side we see the vestiges
of a laurel wreath, also cast roughly away from the dejected figure (illus. 165). But the smaller
sketch is dominated by the fine drawing that appears above it. This must be one of the first
attempts to fix the figure of the Virgin in Good Friday.

165 Study for Good Friday, with Self-portrait, 1853, ink drawing.

[268|
 IED Ee EVOMe Ys ryAm\inll ie cASIN De Or TUB RSS

166 Good Friday, 1856, oil on canvas.

The fact that this sequence of four paintings was unfinished, and that none of the four was
exhibited in Delaroche’s lifetime, has led to a certain amount of confusion in the near-contem-
porary sources that discuss them. Even Ziff, who quotes extensively from the invaluable de-
scriptions by Delaroche published originally in Ulbach’s essay, misses the point that the first
in the sequence was sometimes titled La Vierge chez les Saintes Femmes (The Virgin among the
Holy Women), in other words, this scene in a room from which the cortege of Christ can be
glimpsed on its way to the Crucifixion is not located ‘inside the home of the Virgin’ but in that
of the ‘holy women’ — Mary Magdalene, Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome.'°> What seems to
emerge from scrutiny ofthe published correspondence is the fact that Delaroche worked exten-
sively on Good Friday in 1853 and was returning to it in the ‘last months of his life’) by which
stage he had developed the idea of closing off the series as a ‘poem to the Virgin in four
cantos’."°’ We are entitled to suppose that it was the completion of the small Deposition
(illus. 11), early in 1853, which gave him the inclination to experiment afresh with the possibi-
lities of the panoramic format. But, in Good Friday, the degree of creative exploration was
destined to be much greater than in the earlier work. Where the Deposition adapted a traditional
form of overall composition to the panoramic form, Good Friday attempted a scene which was
pure invention, both in its subject-matter and in its artful arrangement of space (illus. 166).
Delaroche himself both acknowledges this fact and betrays the anxiety associated with his
daring project, when he writes in a letter from 1853 published by Ulbach:
If you knew. . . how lam working. After yesterday, I am less discontented; I have finally found a more
presentable Magdalene. This scene of terror, whose expression should be so new, may well be beyond
my capacities. I will take it to the end, but I am really afraid of failing. Ifit was a subject dictated by the
Gospels, I would be less afraid, but in this everything is invention, and when I| think of what must have
gone on in this room at the moment when the sound of the cortege of Our Lord made itself heard, my
head turns and Iam ready to rip up my canyas.'°7

|269 |
 PAUL DEE ARO GEE

Delaroche has used this novel subject to engineer his most exciting contrast between ‘on’ and
‘off space since the Princes in the Tower, while forgetting none of the lessons learned 1n articulat-
ing the narrativized sequence of figures in the Assassination of the Duc de Guise. Vhe Virgin is at
the centre, and a dusky recess leads into another room, framing and giving depth to her posture.
To the right are the ‘Holy Women’; to the left, Saint Peter and Saint John clinging together by
the window frame, while the ‘presentable’ Magdalene, on whom Delaroche had lavished his
attention, lies on the ground, clenching her hands. The fascination of the work, however,
resides in the fact that the small opening through which the light floods into the sombre room
is also the aperture through which we glimpse the spears of the Roman soldiers and the inscrip-
tion JNRI, which will be placed above the Cross of Christ. In this respect Girardet’s superb
print, edited after Delaroche’s death by Goupil, can clarify what Bingham’s photograph neces-
sarily leaves less well defined (illus. 167). If Delaroche’s letter conveys the otherness of the
glimpsed space by characterizing its auditory effect — ‘the sound of the cortege’ — his instinct

167 Detail of left-hand section of Good Friday from an engraving by Edouard-Henri Girardet.

[270|
 TH ESE OGY AGM Diy AND" OM TE R'S

Se

168 Interior, 1853, oil on cardboard.

as a painter 1s to locate it in this powerful metonymy, which is accessible to reading. From the
epigraphic fragment of the narrative of the Passion, all the other aspects of the scene can be
imaginatively deduced.
Such an account of the mechanics of Good Friday would be incomplete if it did not also
include a reference to the gentle irradiation of every interior surface, in proportion to its
distance or concealment from the source, by the entering light. Around 1853, Delaroche also
painted a simple /nterior, which has been taken as a study for Good Friday (illus. 168). It repre-
sents, possibly, the top floor of the Genoese-style villa at Nice where Delaroche was working,
with a narrow prospect through the window of a sun-swept hillside covered by Mediterranean
vegetation. All of the painter’s skill has been devoted, however, to conveying the incidence and
reflection of light on the rough surfaces of walls, ceiling and floor, as if Delaroche wished to
make his study a pure index of the relative distribution of luminosity, irrespective of any
further particularization of place. Jonathan Crary has exposed, in what might appear a paradox-
ical argument, the disparity between the role of the camera obscura as a model of knowledge in
the seventeenth century and the epistemological revision implicit in the invention of the photo-
graphic camera in the nineteenth. For Descartes and Vermeer: “The camera, or room, 1s the site

[271]
 PAWL) DE EA RO GERE

within which an orderly projection of the world, of extended substance, is made available for
8 : * 7
inspection by the mind? ‘°° For the nineteenth century, however, the very existence of the
camera and of the other proliferating technologies relating to vision that mark the second
quarter of the century helps to displace this ideal model of knowledge. Instead of framing
clearly visualized ideas, the mind participates with the eye and the whole body in the produc-
tion of new visual experiences, narrowing the gap between the representation and the experi-
ential world. Delaroche’s /nterior is distinctively the product of the age of the camera, and not of
the camera obscura. In selecting for study simply the process whereby the light from an aperture
selectively imprints a series of surfaces, he achieves not a tabula rasa for clear ideas but an infi-
nitely variegated record of the interchange between an inside and an outside world, which will
underscore the intensity of his communication if — as in Good Friday — he can discover an ap-
propriate narrative articulation to animate the scene.
The remaining works in the series relating to the Life of the Virgin Mary do not completely
fulfil this goal. The unfinished last painting, the Fainting of the Virgin, reconfigures the main
participants of Good Friday in a similarly proportioned space, but the dynamic interaction
between outer and inner world is absent (illus. 139). The third of the series, the Virgin Contem-
plating the Crown of Thorns (location unknown), 1s also a scene within a virtually sealed chamber.
But the weakness of the motif compared to the contemporary Saint Veronica 1s undeniable. The
lighting is provided principally by a lamp, with an archaeologically accurate design reminiscent
of Poussin. This illuminates the Crown in its central position, as the Virgin stands beside it. But
the sheer drama of the confrontation between the recumbent Veronica and the glowing cloth, a
source of light in itself, is inevitably absent. Delaroche did, however, paint a successor to Good
Friday, which 1s in no way unworthy of it. The Return from Golgotha, begun when Good Friday
was fully sketched out and certainly no earlier than the summer of 1853, is in a sense both a
continuation and an inversion of the previous work (illus. 140). It gives the aftermath of the
Crucifixion, just as its predecessor displayed the prelude. Where Good Friday showed the ap-
prehensive group waiting for the procession to pass, in the Return from Golgotha the disciples
form their own procession, returning with halting steps to the Virgin’s home. She herself is
faltering a few steps short of the doorway, with one arm resting on the shoulder of Saint John
and the other placed on the neck of Saint Mary Magdalene. Behind her, Saint Peter follows,
with the Crown of Thorns. Ulbach is right to insist on the careful discrimination between the
different states of grief expressed by the various participants. But what gives this differentiation
its special poignancy is the extraordinary rhythmic punctuation of the panoramic space. The
eye travels from the cavernous entry on the left, with its glimpse of a turbulent red sunset,
along the stained wall surfaces whose blemishes are exposed by the grey ambient light, and
finally rests at the open doorway to the Virgin’s house. Lamplight deposits an illuminated
wedge on the step, and picks out the edge of the door with its fiery embroidery. It is as if the
Virgin and her supporters had stopped dead, overcome with exhaustion and transfixed by the
sight of a few randomly strewn objects that might belong to the instruments of the Passion.
Like the other works in this late series, the Return from Golgotha is not without connections in
the advanced painting of the mid-century.'*° It also finds an echo in the dramatic achievement

[272]
 EEO ay SE CASVE Lae sAUINGD sO. DE nS

169 Jean-Leon Gerome, Jerusalem (Golgotha: Consummatum Est), 1867, oil on canvas.

of Gerome’s Jerusalem (Golgotha: Consummatum est), produced eleven years later. Géerome has
found a way of condensing the crepuscular light, the winding procession and, above all, the
image of the absent scene of the Crucifixion into one spectacular frame (illus. 169). But if De-
laroche succeeded in spurring on Gerome — here as in so many other cases — he also affirmed a
connection with his own earliest commission, the Pietd of 1820 (illus. g). In this final series
where the body of Christ is always absent, the Virgin must console herself by being attentive
to the world of signs.
Delaroche judged the Return from Golgotha to be still incomplete in his last months, and
never signed it. This was the painting which, as Mirecourt recounts, he refused to relinquish,
despite the exceptionally high offer relayed to him by Goupil. It must now rank, after its recent
sale at auction, among the most modestly priced of any major paintings by a significant nine-
teenth-century artist.'"° These different perspectives coalesce, finally, to offer a faithful image
of Delaroche’s present position, inside and outside the history of painting as it has been told up
to now — but more of an insider than an outsider, we may expect, in the history that will be told
in the future.
 References

CESR29

NOTES French Nineteenth Century, by John Ingamells

(London, 1986), II
The following frequently cited works are identified by the
XPD Exposition des oeuvres de Paul Delaroche:
author’s name, or by a letter abbreviation. For other works
Explication des tableaux, dessins, aquarelles et
cited more than once, the full bibliographical reference is
gravures, exhibition catalogue, Ecole des
given with the first citation of each chapter, and the
Beaux-Arts (Paris, 1857) [Includes
subsequent references include the author’s name and a
explanatory material from Salon catalogues. |
shortened title.
Ziff Norman Ziff, Paul Delaroche: A Study in

Delaborde Henri Delaborde, ‘Paul Delaroche’, in Etudes Nineteenth-century French History Painting,
sur les beaux-arts en France et en Italie (Paris, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University,
1864), pp. 261-315 [This is a slightly revised 1974; authorized facsimile printed and
version ofthe essay published originally in distributed by U.M.I. Dissertation Services
Revue des deux mondes, 1 March 1857, pp. 5— (Ann Arbor, 1994)
32, and included in Godde, q.v.]
NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS: Unless otherwise specified,
Dumas Alexandre Dumas, ‘Paul Delaroche’, in Mes
the translations from the French are my own. Where a
memoires, ed. Pierre Josserand (Paris, 1968), V,
primary document or source is translated in the text the
PP. 23-9
original French is given in a footnote.
Gautier Theophile Gautier, ‘Exposition des oeuvres
de Paul Delaroche au Palais des Beaux-Arts’,
L’Artiste, new series, I, 3 May 1857, pp. 77—80 INTRODUCTION

[There is an English translation ofthis essay 1. The guest book of the monastery of Camaldoli shows
by Cecil Gould in Delaroche and Gautier: clearly that Delaroche, together with his fellow artists
Gautier’s Views on the Execution of Lady Jane Edouard Bertin, Henri Delaborde and Edouard Odier,
Grey and on Other Compositions by Delaroche, spent the period 16 to 25 July at the monastery, and then
exhibition catalogue by National Gallery, returned from 11 August to 26 September. Ziff has been
London, 1975, unpaginated. | misled by a source which takes into account only the first of
Godde Henri Delaborde and Jules Godde, Oewvre de these visits, and wrongly situates the visit at the sister
Paul Delaroche (Paris, 1858) {Catalogue monastery of Vallombrosa. Halevy describes the visit
raisonné illustrated with photographs by faithfully, except that he seems to conflate the monastery
Robert Jefferson Bingham, and containing the and the hermitage (¢/ sacro eremo di Camaldoli). Although a
early version of Delaborde’s essay. The text is few kilometres distant from one another, the two
unpaginated, but plates are numbered institutions were (and are) part of the same monastic house,
throughout.] divided, according to the rule of Saint Romuald, between
Halevy F. E. Halevy, ‘Paul Delaroche’, in Souvenirs et the coenobitic and the eremitic ways of life. Although
portraits: Etudes sur les beaux-arts (Paris, 1861), Haleévy implies that they stayed in the simple individual
PP. 241-74 lodgings of the hermitage, it is likely that they spent most of
Heine The Works of Heinrich Heine, translated from the time in the monastery, where most ofthe sitters for
the German by Charles Godfrey Leland Delaroche’s portraits were certainly to be found. See Ziff,
|Hans Breitman|] (London, 1893), IV p. 138 and Halevy, pp. 257-8. lam grateful to the archivist of
LAR Les Années romantiques: la peinture frangaise de Camaldoli, Don Ugo, for welcoming me to the monastery
1815 a 1550, exhibition catalogue, Reunion and showing me the entries in the guest book.
des Musees Nationaux (Paris, 1995) 2. ‘Le succes du jeune peintre fut immense. On peut dire
Mirecourt Eugene de Mirecourt, Delaroche Decamps que, des lors, il conquit son rang parmi les artistes les plus
(third edition, Paris, 1871) celebres du siécle. Mirecourt, p. 10.
WCC The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures: 3. Fora contemporary estimate of the increased size of
 ATURE D EeGyAvRi@
iG Eek

the Salon, see ‘Notice historique sur les expositions was ‘a brutal and boorish millionaire who used his patronage
publiques’, Le Magasin pittoresque, 2e annee, 1834, p. 114. and collections only in order to assist his social climbing’ and
There were 2,314 items in the Salon of 1834, as opposed to holds that ‘he was a man of intelligence and curiosity whose
1,152 in the Salon of 1824. From 1833, it operated on an love of art was genuine and well-informed’ (p.29).
annual basis. 14. Delaroche’s intimate correspondence with Henri
4. Lam following here the account of the emergence of Delaborde suggests, however, that he may have been too
the genre historique given by Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, in proud to put his name forward against what he judged to be
‘Historicism and “Heritage” in the Louvre, 1820-40: From inferior candidates. Ina letter dated 24 April 1846, he
the Mus¢ée Charles X to the Galerie d’Apollon’, Art History, announced, on the subject of the vacant post, that ‘Iam
x1v/4 (December 1991), p. 509. Of course this is not to deny definitively refusing to enter into competition with the
that historical painting concerned specifically with national mediocrities who will come and offer their services to the
themes existed in the eighteenth century. The Comte government and the Institut’ (‘definitivement je renonce a
d’Angiviller’s plan for a series of tapestries representing entrer en lice avec les mediocrites qui viendront offrir leur
episodes of French history, resulting in such paintings as service au gouvernement et a linstitut’; Bibliotheque de
Jean-Simon Barthélemy’s La Reprise de Paris sur les anglais of Institut, MS 2156, f.143).
1787 (Louvre), is a case in point. It will be argued here, 15. ‘Ila connu le succes de bonne heure; mais le succes
however, that the genre historique as it develops after 1830 is na pas plus épuise ses forces que trompeé sa raison.’
an integral part of the new historical consciousness of the Delaborde, p. 362.
Romantic period, and to that extent quite distinct from 16. The role of Gerome as a collaborator on the large
earlier historical representations. Charlemagne was particularly important; he later claimed to
5. Le Magasin pittoresque, 2e année, 1834, p. 273. have done the e¢hauche, which would haye ‘included working
6. Halevy, p. 256. up the composition as well as transferring it from the
7. Details ofhis election are available in the Archives of cartoon to the canvas’. See Gerald M. Ackerman, 7he Life
the Academie des Beaux-Arts, Registre des proces-verbaux and Work ofJean-Leon Gerome (London, 1986), p. 30. In the
de ses seances (held in the Archives de l'Institut de France). previous decade, Delaborde worked on Strafford (1836) and
Delaroche was one ofsix candidates proposed to fill the Robert-Fleury on the Takers ofthe Bastille (1839) and
vacant place at the sitting of 27 October 1832, and was possibly Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers ofCromwell (1836).
elected on 3 November 1832 by an absolute majority after See further discussion of these works on pp. 147-54. There
four ballots (Registre 1826—36, pp. 280-81). was of course nothing unusual about this practice, which
8. ‘On eut dit qwil voulait, tout rempli des belles images was an integral part of the studio system. Albert Boime
qu’il yenait de contempler, en fortifier son esprit. . . mentions that Millet,‘afavourite pupil of Delaroche,. . .
prendre pour guides dans la voie difficile qu'il allait suivre aided the master in preparing the Hemucycle at the Ecole |des
les maitres naifs et austeres dont il invoquait le souvenir, Beaux-Arts], and when Millet could no longer afford atelier
Halevy, pp. 256—7. For an estimate of the importance of fees, the master permitted him to continue free ofcharge,
such a large-scale architectural project to Delaroche and the For this and other useful comments on Delaroche’s studio,
other artists of his time, see Marc J. Gotlieb, The Plight of see Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the
Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1986),
(Princeton, 1996), pp. 9-52. pp. 56-8.
g. It isan ironic reflection on the substitution that 17. Theophile Gautier, ‘Exposition de tableaux
Maurice Denis later described Ziegler’s work as having ‘a modernes’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, V (1860), p. 296. See
bombast and a bad taste more worthy of the studio of p. 216
Delaroche than of the school of Ingres’. See Maurice Denis, 18. See XPD, pp. vii-ix for the catalogue preface signed
Theories: Du Symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre by these artists, among others, on behalf of the ‘friends and
classique (Paris, 1920), p. 111. For further comment on the pupils’ of Delaroche.
Madeleine project and Delaroche’s possible good fortune in 1g. ‘Les amis et les eleves de M. Paul Delaroche ont
abandoning it, see pp. 202. concu la pensee de faire de ses oeuvres une exposition
10. For the most dramatic, if fanciful, account ofthis publique qui leur a paru devoir etre a la fois le plus bel
episode, see Mirecourt, pp. 24—9. Its basic point is hommage a sa memoire et un service reel a rendre a Vart.
corroborated by Halevy, p. 261, and Dumas, pp. 28—9. Cette pensée a ete accueillie par un sentiment unanime
11. Dumas, p. 20. approbation et @interet. Le grand artiste, devenu chaque
12. Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (Paris, année plus severe pour lui-meme, s’était depuis quelques
1966), p. 51. Gautier’s hostility to Delaroche’s work reached années retire du concours ou ses progres auraient pu ¢tre
its peak in his review of the 1837 Salon, recently republished apprecies de tous. L’exposition de ses tableaux aura done
in Theophile Gautier, Critique d'Art, ed. Marie-Helene presque linteret de la nouveauté.” XPD, pp. vii-viii.
Girard (Paris, 1994), pp. 185—92. 20. Godde, plate 61.
13. Although Pourtales remains a somewhat shadowy 21. A similar exhibition was devoted to the work of Ary
figure, it is possible to learn a great deal about Demidoffas a Scheffer on his death two years later. The exhibition was
collector in Anatole Demidoff, Prince ofSan Donato, held in 1859 and, on this occasion, the Marquess of Hertford
exhibition catalogue by Francis Haskell and others, Wallace offered improvized rooms in the garden of his house on the
Collection (London, 1994). In his fascinating biographical Boulevard des Italiens to display the paintings. Philippe
essay, Haskell is inclined to reject the view that Demidoff Burty remarked at the time that he knew ‘nothing so
 RE PE REN
GES

touching as this new habit of gathering together after the and camera obscura optics, but to the chemists, who
death ofamaster his scattered works and inviting the crowd discovered how to fix the fugitive effects of light. See Roland
to see them. Gazette desBeaux-Arts, IL (1859), p. 40. Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris, 1980), p. 126.
22. See pp. 264-5. 31. See p. 258 for Decaisne’s reference to the replica of
23. ‘La peinture est morte a dater de ce jour’, quoted in Cromiell completed at Nice for Goupil. The version of
Gaston Tissandier, Les Merverlles de la photographie (Paris, Napoleon Crossing the Alps shown here (illus. 149) is dated
1974), p- 62. No earlier printed source has yet been found for ‘Nice, 1850’.
this alarmist remark, which runs counter to the spirit of 3 2.x Muirecourt recounts, as a point in favour of
Delaroche’s report compiled for Arago. However, its Delaroche’s fairness, the visit made to him by Delacroix to
existence, even though apocryphal, does point to the likely solicit his support in the election after Granet’s death in
ambivalence of Delaroche’s attitude to photography. 1849; on this occasion, Delaroche pointed out that he had a
24. The extraordinary story has been impeccably prior commitment to his friend Robert-Fleury, but would
documented in Annick Bergeon, ‘Le Temps cisele, not act on it, as he believed Decamps to be entitled to the
correspondances autour dune oeuvre gravée: éditeurs, place (Mirecourt, p. 14). As Decamps was a friend of
artistes, critiques (1829—1859)’, Etat de lieux, I (1994), Delacroix, this remark can only have been disarming.
pp. 37-88. 33. See Cecil Gould, Delaroche and Gautier, National
25. ‘J’ai 51 ans, mes enfants sont encore bien jeunes et ils Gallery catalogue (London, 1975), unpaginated.
n’ont que moi. I] faut donc que je prenne un parti pour 34. The note is to be found on the drawing at the Louvre,
terminer serieusement leur éducation et pour assurer leur Departement des Arts Graphiques, NF 35133.
avenir, s'il est encore possible de réver un aussi grand 35. Letter from Sir Michael Levey, 4 June 1996.
bonheur. Les amis me disent allez aux Etats-Unis, c’est un 36. Gould, Delaroche and Gautier, unpaginated.
pays neufet a aide de votre nom vous y ferez fortune. Les 37. The unfinished work is, however, undoubtedly by
autres veulent que j’aille en Russie ou tout le monde Delaroche, having remained in the possession of his family
m/attend, a commencer par!Empereur. . . En Angleterre, since his death. For a hypothesis on how it fits into the
la Reine vient de m’acheter une petite reduction d’apres pattern of his work in the mid-184os, see pp. 231, 239.
mon Napoleon a Fontainebleau. Colnaghi le M[archan|d 38. See Mayer, Auction Prices (1995).
destampes de la Cour pretend que mon nom est en odeur de 39. See Mirecourt, pp. 49-50.
saintete dans ce pays et que je gagnerai tout ce que je 40. See La Feanne d’Are de Paul Delaroche, exhibition
youdrais. Faut-il aller au plus pres? Faut-il passer jusqu’a St catalogue by Marie-Pierre Foissy-Aufrere, Musée des
Petersbourg. . . ? Vaudrait-il mieux tenter les Etats-Unis? Beaux-Arts, Rouen (1983).
Je serais bien vite décidé si un bon ami comme yous me 41. See Les Anneées romantiques: la peinture francaise de
disait, je suis libre, nous irons ensemble, nous ne nous 1515 a 1850, exhibition catalogue, Reunion des Musees
quitterons pas. . . mais vous 1etes pas libre et je suis seul Nationaux (Paris, 1995): cited here as LAR.
bien seul pour tout le reste de ma triste vie et il m’est bien 42. Stendhal, Oewvres completes: Melanges IIT Peinture
difficile, bien dur de refouler chaque jour au fond de mon (Geneva, 1972), p. 9.
coeur toutes ces pensees qui l’etouffent. Lettres de Paul 43. Stendhal, Du Romantisme
dans les arts, ed. Juliusz
Delaroche a Henri Delaborde, Bibliotheque de l'Institut de Starzynski (Paris, 1966), p. 126.
France, MS 2156, f.145 (a shortened version ofthis passage 44. Ibid., pp. 109-10.
is published in Delaborde, pp. 308-09). 45. Correspondance de George Sand, ed. Georges Lubin
26. The small reduction of Napoleon at Fontainebleau had (Paris, 1964), I, pp. 924-5.
been bought as a present for Prince Albert. Queen Victoria 46. ‘Si le visiteur dune galerie, en s’arretant devant un
also later purchased the small painting of Napoleon at Saint tableau, au lieu de le regarder et d’en jouir, feuillete @abord
Helena which was listed in Godde, though Bingham’s son livret pour s’enquerir de la scene historique ou de
photographic reproduction showed the large sketch on the Panecdote representee, yous pouvez dire, sans crainte de
studio wall (see Ziff, pp. 228, 294, 300; Godde, plate 61). yous tromper: Cet homme, assurement, n’aime pas la
27. Quoted in Edward Morris, ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps peinture. Gautier, pp. 77-8.
by Paul Delaroche’, Walker Art Gallery Annual Reports and 47. ‘Delaroche a beaucoup trop pense a ces visiteurs-la.
Bulletin, vols UAV (Liverpool, 1971-4), p. 72. Haydon’s ire La purete du dessin, la force ou la finesse du modele,
was aroused specifically by the decision of ‘two noble lords’ Pharmonie de la couleur, imitation de la nature, idealisee
{the Duke of Sutherland and Lord Ellesmere] to par le style, importent autrement que la curiosite ou le choix
commission ‘pictures life size’ from Delaroche. For their du fait. Gautier, p. 78.
purchases, Strafford and Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers of 48. Henry James, Autobiography (New York, 1956),
Crommell, see pp. 147-54. PP- 194-5.
28. See announcement of the opening of the new 49. Henry James, The Painter's Eye (London, 1956), p. 75:
museum in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 (1859), p. 192. 50 . Ibid., p. 223.
222

29. This took place in the Restoration period at the 51 . See Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, “The juste
Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, later to be renowned for the milieu and Thomas Couture’, in Romanticism and Realism:
display of many different forms of visual spectacle. The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art (London and
30. My formulation picks up, @ contrario, Barthes’s Boston, 1984), pp. 113-21. It might be thought that so slight
statement that photography was indebted not to the a piece as this, which originated in a book review, would not
painters, who transmitted concepts of framing, perspective be worth much attention. But the sheer paucity of other

[277]
 PAW IE DEG ALRO' G EE

material, and the evident currency of Rosen and Zerner’s Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, 1980).
arguments, make it necessary to pay them some attention, Fried’s notion of ‘theatricality’ as being in dialectical tension
The notion of the juste nulieu, simplified to the point of with the ‘absorptive’ effect exercised by the work will be
banality, forms the basis for one of the most recent attempts taken for granted here.
to explain the position of Delaroche and a number of related 61. ‘Maintenant, quelle sera la place de Paul Delaroche
artists in the second quarter of the nineteenth century: see dans l’avenir? il sera en peinture ce que Casimir Delavigne
Stephen F. Eisenman, “The July Monarchy and the Art of est en poesie. Gautier, p. 80.
Juste Miliew, in Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History 62. John Toews, ‘Musical Historicism and the
(London, 1994), pp. 191-6. Transcendental Foundations of Community:
52. Quoted in Rosen and Zerner, “The juste miliew, p. 117. Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang and the “Christian-German”
Of course, it is not necessary to view Rosenthal’s analysis Cultural Politics of Frederick William IV’, in Rediscovering
outside its specific historical context, as Rosen and Zerner Flistory: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael Roth
are prone to do. In his excellent introduction to a recent re- (Stanford, 1994), p. 190.
edition of the work, Michael Marrinan has emphasized the 63. Lhid., p. 188.
extent to which Rosenthal’s historical viewpoint was 64. See Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of
coloured by the contemporary writings on the primacy of History (New York, 1995), pp. 3-10.
facture, such as Signac’s D’Eugene Delacroix au néo- 65. Art Journal, new series, I (1849), p. 60.
impressionisme (1899). See Leon Rosenthal, Du Romantisme 66. See Stephen Bann, The Clothing ofClo: A Study of
au réalisme (Paris, 1987), pp. Xii—Xiil. the Representation of History in Nineteenth-century Britain and
53. See Albert Boime,‘ “The Unhappy Medium”: An France (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 8-31; also Bann,
Exchange’, Nem York Review of Books, 21 October 1982, Romanticism, pp. 17-29.
pp. 49-50. To Boime belongs the credit for having been 67. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and
perhaps the first art historian to give serious attention to Poetry (London, 1906), p. 61.
Delaroche’s stature in the post-war period. However, his 68. Ibid., pp. 61-2.
focus is almost exclusively on Delaroche’s studio, rather 69. ‘Aucun peintre. . . n’exprime avec plus de fidelite les
than on the development of his work. Although he includes tendances générales et les aspirations au milieu desquelles il
valuable material on Delaroche’s concept ofthe ‘sketch’, he a vecu. Ses oeuvres resument clairement le mouvement des
is inclined to repeat the argument that Delaroche’s own idees qui s’est accompli en France depuis trente ans, et les
sketches are superior to his finished paintings, without coutumes (esprit, les gouts de la majorite” Delaborde,
pursuing further the rationale for their difference. See Pp: 31415.
Boime, The Academy and French Painting, pp. 56-8 (for
Delaroche’s conduct of ‘the most effective atelier during the
period of the July Monarchy’) and pp. 102—03 (for
CHAPTER ONE
discussion of the comparative qualities of sketch and
finished painting in the cases of Joan ofArc and Marquis de 1. ‘Paul Delaroche rest pas né peintre.’ Gautier, p. 77.
Pastoret). 2. ‘Iladmira ces gravures qui lui livraient la pensée du
54. Boime,‘ “The Unhappy Medium” ’,p. 49. peintre, il aima toutes ces beautés, mais ne voulait pas en
55. See Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, De /’'Imitation dans les rester le gardien sterile . . . Car il sera peintre, ce jeune
beaux-arts (Paris, 1996), pp. 49-83. This essay, originally homme devoue a l'étude, Halevy, p. 244.
published as a review of Rosen and Zerner’s Romanticism and 3. For details of Delaroche’s family, see Horace
Realism in 1985, rightly dismisses the claims of the recent Delaroche-Vernet, Recherches généalogiques sur Horace Vernet,
protagonists of art pompier to offer an ‘objective’ history, Paul Delaroche et leur famille (Paris, 1907), p. 12. The place of
shorn of the pretensions of the avant-garde. However, it will birth is given as 10 Rue de la Vrilliere, and a substantial town
be clear throughout this study that the arguments for giving house, no later than eighteenth-century in its origins, still
serious attention to Delaroche’s work — however much they exists under this number, although the south side of the
may imply suspending the criteria of quality advanced by street, opposite, has been entirely redeveloped as the site of
the Modernist generation — are not dependent on ‘neo- the Banque de France.
pompier historical revisionism. 4. See the relevant entries in Dictionnaire de biographie
56. Rosen and Zerner, “The juste miliew’, p. 120. Jrangaise; also the contemporary article by Georges
57. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision Duplessis, ‘Le Cabinet des Estampes, son origine et ses
and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, developpements successifs’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, VU
and London, 1990), p. 22. (1860), pp. 129-46.
58. Lbid. 5. Halevy, pp. 243-4.
59. See Gautier, p. 80, and Dumas, pp. 25—8. It may well 6. Delaborde, p. 263.
be that Gautier is simply repeating Dumas’s earlier, more 7. See Richard Wrigley, The Origins ofFrench Art
considered judgement. In effect, Dumas seems to haye a Criticism: From the Ancien Régime to the Restoration (Oxford,
carefully worked-out scheme of comparison between the 1993), P: 355:
painters and the writers of the Romantic period, in which 8. See Catalogue historique et raisonné de tableaux par les
Hugo and Delacroix are paired together, and he himself plus grands peintres principalement des Ecoles d’Ttalie, qui
with Horace Vernet (p.25). compose le rare et célébre galerie du Prince Giustiniant, by Alex.
60. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Paillet and Hyp[polyte] Delaroche (Paris, n.d.), p. xi. The
 ROG E BR EN iG ES

catalogue entries were prepared with the help ofthe 23. David O’Brien, ‘Antoine Gros in Italy’, The
distinguished Italian connoisseur and antiquarian Ennio Burlington Magazine, 137 (1995), pp. 651-60.
Quirino Visconti, who had fled to Paris after the fall of the . Delestre, Gros, p. 261.
Roman Republic in 1799 and presided over the antiquities in . Tbid., p. 284.
the Musée Napoleon at the Louvre. The date of the . See Gotlieb, Meissonier, pp. 54-6.
publication must have been around 1810, when the . See A. Jal, Les Causeries du Louvre: Salon de 1833
Giustiniani collection was about to be sold. (1am most (Paris, 1833), pp. 34ff. The critic had gone so far as to
grateful to Maria Pia Donato for providing this information, predict: ‘Gros is finished, Gros will produce nothing else
which demonstrates Hippolyte Delaroche’s familiarity with except by a miracle’ (p.41).
the advanced connoisseurship ofhis day.) 28. Delestre, Gros, pp. 421-2.
g. See Andrew McClellan, /nventing the Louvre: Art, 29. See ihid., p. 441 for a description of the funeral at the
Politics and the Origins of theModern Museum in Eighteenth- Eglise Saint Thomas d’Aquin in Paris; alsoJ.Tripier le
century Paris (Cambridge, 1994), p. 125. Franc, Histoire de la vie et de la mort du Baron Gros (Paris,
10. Catalogue de tableaux, dessins, estanrpes et autres objets 1880), where the master’s approval of Delaroche’s Princes in
de curtosité, composant la collection de feu M. Léon Dufourny, by the Tower is clearly stated (p.510), and the funeral oration
Hippolyte Delaroche (Paris, 1819), p. 4. published (pp. 545—6).
11. See Catalogue de tableaux anciens, dessins, estampes, 30. David, of course, remained in contact with a number
recueils, livres a figures et sur les arts, objets de curtosité, costumes, of Parisian painters of the previous generation until his
étoffes, etc. qui composaient le cabinet de M. Paul Delaroche death in 1825. In 1820 he received a visit in Brussels from
(Paris, 1857). Gericault and Horace Vernet, and he was frequently in
12. See Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 (1859), p. 50, for a notice communication with Gros by letter. But even Gros was
ofthe sale of the Rattier collection, in which Delaroche is disconcerted by aspects of his later work. See Dorothy
held responsible for the special ‘cachet’ of the objects Johnson, Jacques-Lows David, Art in Metamorphosis
represented there. ‘An intimate friend ofthe family, he often (Princeton, 1993), pp. 235, 246-8.
directed M. Rattier in his purchases, but above all, in my 3 tr. See LAR, p. 418.
bs
opinion, the artist must have been able to signal to the 3 2. Thid., p. 330.
amateur the mediocrity of the objects that had to be taken 33. For an account of Watelet’s life and work, see Lydia
out.’ Harambourg, Dictionnaire des peintres paysagistes francais au
13. See J. B. Delestre, Gros et ses ouvrages ou Mémoires XTXe siecle (Neuchatel, 1985), p. 349. The work entitled
historiques sur la vie et les travaux de ce célebre artiste (Paris, Paysage avec le bon Samaritain in the Musee Magnin, Dijon,
1845), pp. 488-9. which was attributed to Delaroche in the catalogue of the
14. Halevy, p. 245; Delaborde, p. 264; Dumas, p. 24. collection published in 1938, is in fact a study by one of his
15. See Lettres de Paul Delaroche a Henri Delaborde, pupils entered for the ‘Paysage historique’ section of the Prix
Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France, MS 2156, f.141. In this de Rome in 1841, and thus countersigned by Delaroche. See
letter, dated 25 April 1832, Delaroche recounts the numbers P. Grunchec, Les Concours des Prix de Rome 1797-1563
ofthose who have recently died in the cholera epidemic in (Paris, 1986), vol. II, p. 149.
Paris, and mentions the improvement in the health of his 34. LAR, pp. 418-19.
elder brother, whom he was evidently nursing through this 35. Dumas, p. 24.
disease. 36. ‘Il fallait avoir le courage d’avouer a Gros que, seul,
16. Delaborde, who was probably closest to Delaroche’s loin de Poeil du maitre, il avait ose entreprendre, executer,
family, speaks of their resources, ‘though modest. . . non une oeuvre d’étude, essai modeste de l’ecolier, mais un
spar[ing] the young painter the care of providing for the tableau, un vrai tableau, livré a toutes les chances de la vie
necessities oflife’ (p.268). publique.’ Halevy, p. 247.
17. Jules Delaroche evidently continued to paint and 37. ‘Il fut indulgent pour les defauts, indulgent pour les
occasionally exhibit. However, the two landscapes under his qualites.’ Halevy, p. 248.
name in the collection of theMusée des Beaux-Arts, 38. This was to be Joas Saved by Fosabeth (1822). See
Nantes, indicate no more than a meagre talent. PP: 50—53-
18. See ‘Notice historique sur les expositions publiques’, 39. The evocative dwelling is illustrated in Crow,
Le Magasin pittoresque, Il (1834), p. 114. Emulation, p. 216.
19. Théodore Géricault, Des Ecoles de peinture et de 40. Desbordes was the uncle of the celebrated poetess
sculpture et du Prix de Rome (Caen, 1986), unpaginated. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, who wrote a novel about the
20. Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir was first published in milieu centring on her uncle’s studio at La Childeberte, in
1830, but its historical material relates to the general the period when Delaroche was living close by. See Francis
situation of France in the later years of the Restoration. Ambriére, Le Siecle des Valmore: Marceline Desbordes-
21. René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the Valmore et les siens (Paris, 1987), vol.I, p. 257. The novel
World, translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer L’Atelierd'un peintre was re-edited in 1992 by Miroirs
(London, 1987), p. 307. Editions (Conseil Regional Nord—Pas de Calais).
22. See Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for 4i. See Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des
Revolutionary France (New Hayen and London, 1995), and Manuscrits, NF 16800, letter from Lami to Delaroche
Mare Gotlieb, The Plight ofEmulation: Ernest Meissonter
and (1835), f.111: ‘Horace par exemple est-il pour vous comme je
French Salon Painting (Princeton, 1996). crois qu'il le sera toujours, ne serait-ce que pour amour de sa

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fille, c’est-a-dire bien franc, bien ouvert et mettant de cote Paul Delaroche (Paris, 1857): the drawing by Gericault is
toute idée de rivalité’ This letter testifying to the excellent titled ‘Palefrenier a cheval’, and that by Granet ‘Interieur
relations of both young artists with Horace Vernet is un couvent.
published in P.-André Lemoisne, Eugene Lami 1500—18g0 58. See checklist in Ziff, p. 274.
(Paris, 1912), p. 86. Its immediate occasion is Lami’s 59. XPD, p. 1. ‘I still picture to myself his distraught
enthusiastic response to the news of Delaroche’s impending nurse,’ Who had thrown herselfin vain before the
marriage to Louise Vernet. executioners,/ and feeble, carried him tipped over on her
42. See Gericault, exhibition catalogue by Sylvain breast./ I took him all covered in blood,
Laveissiére and Regis Michel (Paris, Reunion des Musees 60. Entry on Delaroche, Dictionnaire de biographie
Nationaux, 1991), p. 2, where Carle Vernet is described as Jrangaise.
his ‘second pedagogue’. 61. See Ziff, p. 17, note 38.
43. For Horace Vernet’s work during the July Monarchy, 62. See Stendhal, Du Romantisme, pp. 49—50 (extracts
see Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics
forLouis-Philippe: from journal dated 10 November 1810).
Art and Ideology in Orleanist France (New Haven and 63. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, p. 296.
London, 1988). 64. Ziff, p. 18.
44. Stendhal, Du Romantisme dans les arts, ed. Julius 65. See Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New
Starzynski (Paris, 1966), p. 130. York,1995),
PP- 134-44.
45. See p. 118. 66. Quoted in A. Augustin-Thierry, Le Tragédien de
46. See Gericault catalogue, pp. 208-09 (lithographs Napoléon: Frangois-Foseph Talma (Paris, 1942), p. 239.
published by Gericault, 1 February 1821). 67. Lbid.
47. His well-known lithograph of 1820, La Consigne, has 68. It is listed as belonging to this collection in 1857
been described as ‘the work [in] which one can spot for the (XPD, p. 1). Subsequently it was sent to the Musee de
first time the personality of the artist’ (Lemoisne, Lamu, ‘Troyes, where it is at present rolled up and awaiting
p. 12). restoration (letter of Chantal Rouquet, 17 January 1996).
48. A possible exception is the very schematic lithograph 69. Halevy, p. 250.
credited to ‘C.Motte’, which was published with the title jo. Thiers, who defended Delacroix’s Barque ofDante in
Jean d'Are malade interrogee dans sa prison in 1824. This bears his review of the Salon, also saw the group ofslaughtered
the signature ‘Laroche’, which would seem to indicate its children as the most effective aspect of the work; his overall
origin in a drawing by Delaroche, although he never used verdict was not positive (see Ziff, p. 19).
that form ofsignature in any other work. Both the small 71. Halevy, p. 250. In the exceptionally detailed and
lithograph ofthe Princes in the Tower (illus. 42) and the helpful chronology ofthe Géricault catalogue, this later visit
etching of Louise Vernet in November 1845 (illus. 146) seem by Delaroche is placed at around October 1824.
to have been purely private ventures. 72. XPD, p.2.
49. Although unsigned, it is attributed to Delaroche in 73. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, p. 59.
Henri Beraldi, Les Graveurs du XIXe siecle (Nogent-le-Roi, 74. Chopin noted (erroneously) ina letter of 18 June 1849
1981 re-edition), p. 167. Beraldi also lists the three works that ‘Delaroche’s eldest son [had] died at Versailles’ (Se/ected
mentioned in the previous note, and a further print: correspondence ofFryderyk Chopin, ed. Bronislaw Sydow
‘Mazarin, lith. a la plume, 1830 (L4rtiste)’. But although (London, 1962), p. 359). Also an undated letter
L*Artiste did indeed publish lithographs relating to (Bibliotheque Nationale, Manuscrits, NAF 16800, f.8) from
Delaroche’s Richelieu (in 1829) and Mazarin (in 1830), the Augustin Brohan begins: ‘I went yesterday to Versailles to
name ofthe lithographer is clearly stated in both cases as visit your house Monbauron [votre maison de Monbauron|-
‘Delaunois’. (Iam grateful to Nicolas Milovanovic for As the latter describes a state of extreme damp in the house,
helping me to clarify this issue; he also points out that in the it is probable that the Delaroche family rarely resided there,
Godde catalogue of 1858 they are attributed to Eugene except in emergencies such as the cholera epidemic of 1849
Lami.) in which Horace Delaroche was (happily not fatally)
50. For further details on Antonio Tamburini, and the affected. The probability is that the long-standing
development of Rossini’s celebrity at the time, see Grove, connection — maintained when Horace Delaroche himself
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and Hugo Riemann, took up residence in Versailles after his father’s death —
Dictionnaire de musique. began with a property inherited from the artist’s mother.
51. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Mary M. Innes 75. Originally hung in the new quarters of the Conseil
(London, 1955) pp. 124, 133. (Etat, in the Louvre, the painting was later transferred as a
52. Lbid., pp. 250-51. result of a further move to the Palais d’Orsay, and destroyed
53. Armand Dayot, Carle Vernet: étude sur artiste survie when the building was burned down by the communards in
d'un catalogue de loeuvre grave et lithographie (Paris, 1925), 1871. See Ziff, pp. 62—6, for a more detailed account and for
p. 30. details of the excellent reception by critics. Fortunately, a
54. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of full-size copy of outstanding quality was painted by L.
Painting in the rS6o0s (Chicago and London, 1996), p. 58. Alexandre in 1869, and this can still be seen by arrangement
55. Andre Girodie, Un Peintre des fétes galantes: Jean- at the Palais de Justice, Bordeaux. An engraving by Pelee
Frederic Schall (Strasbourg, 1927), p. 5. also exists.
56. The routine is described in Lemoisne, Lami, p. 8. 76. This work was frequently compared to Pierre-Paul
57. See Catalogue des tableaux, esquisses et croquis de M. Proudhon’s paintings of Napoleon’s son, The King of Rome

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(1812). For Delaroche’s identification with the image of (Departement des Arts Graphiques, RF 12843). This,
Napoleon from the late 1830s onwards, see pp. 245-56. however, is a reduced version of one of the oil paintings
77. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logicofthe (illus. 88), which are signed as usual with the capitalized ‘R’;
Gaze (New Haven and London, 1983), p. 77. it is more than likely that the aberrant signature, which only
78. For the story of young Caumont, see Voltaire, vaguely recalls Delaroche’s hand, is in fact no more than an
Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1831), La Henriade, pp. 45, 54-5. identification, added when the watercolour was being
79. See Bann, Romanticism, pp. 134-5, for discussion and utilized for printmaking purposes.
illustration of the work. g2. Archives des Beaux-Arts, Régistre des proces-
80. XPD, pp. 3-4. verbaux de ses seances, 1826-36, pp. 28off.
81. This assumes, of course, that there is an arm of the 93. This is the case for Beranger’s study prints, edited by
Seine between the foreground scene and the towers of Goupil after Delaroche’s death; in the case of engravings
Notre-Dame. Delaroche may well have wished to evoke the completed in his lifetime, such as Henriquel-Dupont’s
recent as well as the more ancient memory ofthe Place de la Strafford (1840), the capitalized ‘R’ is maintained.
Greye, as it was ineradicably associated with the presence of 94. The /ocus classicus for such an approach would be in
the guillotine during the Revolution. the work of Jacques Derrida, notably in an essay such as
82. See Amedee Pichot, Voyage historique et littéraire en ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in Writing and Difference,
Angleterre et en Ecosse (Paris, 1825), vol.1, pp. 130, 165, and translated by Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), pp. 196-231.
vol.III, p. 474. Marcelin Pleynet has written particularly well about the
83. See Amédee Pichot, Vues pittoresques de |’Ecosse painter’s relationship with the proper name in such works as
dessinees d apres nature par F. A. Fernot. . . ornées de douze Painting and System, translated by Sima N. Godfrey
vignettes d apres les dessins de Delaroche jeune et Eugene Lami (Chicago, 1977), pp. 73-9, where Matisse is under
(Paris, 1826). discussion.
84. See also note 47: the signature is in cursive script, 95. Horace Delaroche-Vernet, Recherches genéalogiques,
rather than being a printed attribution to indicate the source p. 12.
of the image. No other instance can be found of Delaroche’s 96. See the numerous vies des peintres featured in the sale
dispensing with the ‘De’. catalogue after his death: Cataloguede tableaux anciens
85. See Dictionnaire de biographie francaise: the entry (Paris, 1857), pp. 16-17. I would not wish to imply that this
precedes Delaroche’s own. Delaroche’s close friend Henri biographical motive was the only one that impelled
Delaborde, himself also from a family ennobled during the Delaroche to choose this subject, which had a wider
Empire, seems to have retained throughout his life the form significance because ofthe debt of French academic art to
in which his name is now spelled; however this may have the Bolognese school.
been connected to the fact that there was a well-known 97. The funeral oration after Agostino’s death was
ancien regime noble family called de Laborde. evoked by Neo-classicists such as Mengs to justify
86. This applied, for example, to the families of two eclecticism as a valid style, and Delaroche may well have had
future sitters of Delaroche, the Marquis de Pastoret and this in mind when choosing the subject, though it is hard to
Charles de Remusat. Indeed Remusat testifies to the level of see precisely how he would have interpreted the theme in
casuistry that went into the establishment of such a the context of the 1820s.
convention when he reveals that he allowed himself to be g8. Pichot had encouraged Delaroche to work on
credited with the particule in official documents and on Scottish themes in his Voyage historique et litteraire, vol.11,
letters, whilst rejecting what he believed to be a dubious pp. 474-92 (‘Lettre a M. Paul de Laroche’); however, in this
claim in the case of his own signature: see Charles de scene, the choice of an incident from after the Battle of
Remusat, Mémozres de ma vie (Paris, 1958), I, p. 17. Culloden seems far removed from the more melodramatic
87. ‘Cet acte éclatant encouragea les secrets desirs de M. episodes that Pichot had recommended to him, and which
Delaroche. II ne songea pas a engager la lutte avec M. he had adopted for the vignettes drawn from the tale of The
Delacroix sur son propre terrain, mais i] comprit que le Abbot in Vues pittoresques de l'Ecosse. See also Ziff, p. 54, for
temps était venu pour tous de s’affranchir impunement du the connection of Miss Macdonald with ‘the issue of rightful
joug classique, que le succes meme ne pouvait s’obtenir qu’a rule’.
ce prix, et qu'il fallait, sous peine de se voir releguer parmi 99. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes:
les disciples @un art use, poursuivre ouvertement, chacun Nouvelle edition ornée de quarante-deux vignettes d apres les
dans sa voie, ’idéal nouveau dont un cote venait d’etre dessins de Deveria (Paris, 1826); and Vues des différentes
revéle” Delaborde, pp. 268-8. habitations deJ.J. Rousseau . . . (Paris, 1819).
88. See p. 277, note 32. 100. Girodie, Schall, pp. 1off.
89. The problem is discussed in Marcelin Pleynet, Les tor. Sbid., p. 13.
Modernes et la tradition (Paris, 1990), pp. 68—9. 102. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes (Paris,
go. A possible exception is the sketch for Joan of Arc in 1964), I, p. 73-
the Wallace Collection (illus. 34). This is signed but not 103. Lbid., p. 74.
dated, and the likelihood must be that it was signed at a later 104. Jbid., p.75.
date by Delaroche, possibly when it came up for auction in 105. Ibid., p.8o.
1830 (see WCC, p. 114). 106. Ibid.
gi. Again, there is one possible exception that proves the 107. See p. 249. Stephen Duffy has rightly pointed out to
rule: the fine watercolour portrait of Guizot in the Louvre me the existence ofa small number of self-portrait drawings,

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such as the two fine examples in the Musee Hebert, Paris. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and other
The intimacy of these works suggests that they were Essays, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1964), pp. 204-12.
presented to friends and not for public showing. See also 12. ‘Les grands maitres ont exploite le champ de
p. 292, note 57. invention poétique avec un tel succes, qu’a peine reste-t-il
108. SeeT. J. Clark, in Roth, Rediscovering History, a glaner sur leurs traces quelques rares debris. Desormais la
PP. 243 307. moisson est faite. Les idées religieuses ont trouve depuis
109. Ibid., p.258. longtemps leur forme definitive . . . En dehors de ces deux
110. Lbid. interprétations suprémes, qu’y a-t-il a tenter? L’analyse des
évenements purement humaines, la representation des faits
au point de yue purement dramatique et sous leur aspect,
CHAPTER TWO
non le plus grandiose, mais le plus probable. Un
1. See Gautier, ‘Exposition de tableaux modernes’, enseignement direct, et jusqu’a un certain point familier,
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, V (1860), p. 296, with reference to voila ce qui s’appropriera le mieux aux conditions de lart
the small Galileo (1832): “The colour has more warmth and moderne, aux besoins intellectuels de notre epoque.’
intensity than one finds in his large paintings, and the Delaborde, p. 278.
execution has the highest degree offinish, 13. See Catalogue de tableaux anciens, dessins, estampes,
2 5 ZAbit jor. AP, recueuls, livres afigures et sur les arts, objets de curtosité, costumes,
3 . P.-André Lemoisne, Eugene Lami rSoo—1890 (Paris, étoffes, etc. qui composaient le cabinet de M. Paul Delaroche
1912), pp. 30-31. (Paris, 1857), p. 10. The print is described as a ‘Belle epreuve
4. Ibid., p. 41. Perhaps this experience lies behind the avant la lettre’ which suggests that it was an artist’s proof,
report, diffused in an obituary, that Delaroche had fought on given to Delaroche by Mercurt.
the barricades in July 1830; this is denied in Delaborde, 14. Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and
p-275- the French Left, 1830-1850 (Princeton, 1993), p. 161.
5. Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des 15. Lbid.
Manuscrits, NF 16800, letter from Lami to Delaroche 16. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of
(1835), f.111: ‘cette prison sombre et humide que l’on appelle Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London, 1996), p. 135.
votre logement de l'Institut. 17. See Michael Fried, ‘Painting Memories: On the
6. Although Scheffer’s establishment, in its small enclave Containment ofthe Past in Baudelaire and Manet) Critical
off the Rue Chaptal, has been especially well preserved, the Inquiry, to (March 1984), pp. 510-42. The quotation is from
rest of the quarter has also remained relatively untouched, P. 530.
and Delaroche’s own substantial house remains (now the 18. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, p. 163.
property of the fashion designer Ines de la Fressange). 19. See David Carrier, High Art: Charles Baudelaire and
Chopin wrote that Mme Delaroche ‘received in her house the Origins ofModernist Painting (University Park,
the most distinguished people here’. See Fryderyk Chopin, Pennsylvania, 1996), especially the Appendix (pp.173—6).
Selected Correspondence, collected by Bronislay Sydow 20. The work was shown for the first time at the Salon of
(London, 1962), p. 260 (letter of 12 December 1845). Douai in 1823, where it gained a Silver Medal. It was almost
7. Horace Delaroche-Vernet, Recherches généalogiques sur certainly the older artist Constant Desbordes, a native of this
Horace Vernet, Paul Delaroche etleur famille (Paris, 1907), p. 12. northern French town, who led Delaroche to exhibit there.
8. See Robert Baschet, E£.-7. Delécluze temoin de son temps The Societe des Amis des Arts, as was their custom, raffled
(Paris, 1942), p. 198. the painting and it was attributed to M. Demasure. See Les
g. ‘Jefus etonne. . . de empire qu’a trente-trois ans Paul Salons retrouves: Eclat de la vie artistique dans la France du
Delaroche exergait autour de lui. Ceux qui reclamaient ses Nord 1815-1848 (Association des Conservateurs des Musées
conseils étaient nombreux . . . Ce qui me frappait le plus, du Nord—Pas-de-Calais, 1993), I, p. 47.
c’était la confiance extraordinaire qu’on avait dans son 21. The entry in the catalogue to the Salon of Douai
avenir; le bouton avait paru, la fleur allait éclorer, (1823, p. 20) describes the subject as ‘tire de la vie des
Delaborde, p. 274. peintres’, Delaroche’s library contained numerous ‘lives of
to. ‘Avant de jeter une idée sur la toile, il la murissait par the painters’, including a rare original edition of Vasari
de longues études, fouillait les bibliotheques publiques et (Florence, 1568) and a more recent version (Milan, 1807).
particulieres, compulsait les vieux recueils, les collections de See Catalogue de tableaux anciens, pp. 16—17.
gravures anciennes, l’histoire des faits, des ameublements, 22. He is clearly recognizable as the young man in the
des costumes. La science qu il avait acquise par ces bottom right corner of Boilly’s picture of the pupils of Gros
recherches constantes devenait enorme. Sa memoire était (illus. 8). Jeanne Magnin’s identification is quoted from
une veritable encyclopédie artistique. Voila pour la manuscript notes in Musée Magnin; Peintres et dessins de
preparation de oeuvre. Quant a l’execution, il y apportait lécole francaise (Dijon, 1938), p. 65. For further details of
plus d’etude encore. I] revenait vingt fois sur le meme trayail, Roger’s career, see LAR, p. 420.
modifiant, retouchant sans cesse, effagant meme une oeuvre 23. See /ngres, exhibition catalogue, Petit Palais (Paris,
sur laquelle il avait pali des années entiéres, si une idée 1967), p. 156.
meilleure venait a surgir. Il y a nombre de toiles de 24. Ibid.
Delaroche sur lesquelles, en cherchant, on retrouverait trois 25. See Richard Parkes Bonington: On the Pleasure of
tableaux superposes.’ Mirecourt, pp. 16-17. Painting, exhibition catalogue by Patrick Noon, Yale Center
11. For Baudelaire’s denunciation of Chenavard, see for British Art (New Haven and London, 1991), p. 261.

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26. See WCC, p. 238. pp. 36-9: also 100 Chefs-d oeuvre du Musée des Beaux-Arts de
27. Ingres catalogue, p. 156. Rouen, exhibition catalogue (Tokyo, 1993).
28. It appears that the Societe des Amis des Arts had also 45. Moreau became ‘dessinateur des menus-plaisirs’ in
selected the work to be lithographed: no trace has survived, 1770, and was subsequently ‘dessinateur du cabinet du Ror,
however, of such a print, and the plan may well have been a post which he retrieved with the Bourbon Restoration in
superseded by the more prestigious commission giyen to S. 1814. During the revolutionary period he taught drawing,
W. Reynolds, a distinguished artist who held an being Professeur de dessin at the Ecoles centrales de Paris
appointment as printmaker to George IV. (For the from 1797.
lithographic project, see Les Salons retrouves, p. 47.) 46. This suggests a possible kinship with Fleury
29. [am informed by M. Emmanuel Starcky, Richard’s Tasso et Montaigne (1821; Musée des Beaux-Arts,
Conservateur charge de la conservation du Musée Magnin, Lyon), which was exhibited in the Salon of 1822. It is
that there is very little possibility of the original painting’s known that Delaroche painted a picture on the same
having deteriorated, through paint loss or other factors, in subject, which Delaborde attributes to the period shortly
the particular area concerned. The photograph ofthe work before Joas Rescued by Fosabeth. It is possible that
by Bingham, in Godde’s 1858 catalogue, seems to show Delaroche took note of the long staircase leading down to
more ofthe Virgin, but omits the Angel. the prison that is the central feature of Richard’s work, and
30. Delaborde, p. 289. intended to foreground in Joan ofArc a similar effect,
31. The work is placed on a pillar beneath the organ loft which both the composition and the current state of the
in the Eglise Notre-Dame. | am grateful for the help of M. paint surface render virtually imperceptible. (For Zasso in
Jean-Luc Dauphin who helped me to confirm this present Prison Visited by Montaigne, the painting by Delaroche that
location. was formerly in the collection of the artist’s family, see Ziff,
32. The oblique placing ofthe canvas in Filippo Lippi p- 274.)
would have made it impossible, in any event, to include the 47. Foissy-Aufrere, Jeanne d’Arc, p.71.
angel on the left and the Virgin on the right, as in Lesueur’s 48. Reported in The Independent, 22 December 1995,
composition. It is as if Delaroche (or his engraver) had p. 12.
decided to feature the Virgin, in a reversed image, and 49. Foissy-Aufrere, Jeanne d’Arc, p. 35.
placed a version of Lesueur’s angel immediately above. 50. Ibid., p. 12.
33. Victor Cousin, Du Vrai, du beau et du bien (Paris, 51. Foran early evaluation oftheir collection, left to the
1869), p. 220. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, in 1853, see Olivier Merson,
34. Ibid., p.253. ‘La Galerie Clarke de Feltre’, Revue des Beaux-Arts, 8 (1860),
35. Charles de Remusat, Mémoires de ma vie (Paris, 1958), pp. 192202. Thirteen works by Delaroche were included in
vol.i, p. 243. the donation.
36. ‘C'est surtout cette beaute morale dont Delaroche est 52. This appears to be the only print contributed by
plus vivement touché a mesure qu’il marche vers la maturite Delaroche to a contemporary historical work, and no doubt
de lage et du talent. Halevy, p. 252. reflects his esteem for Barante and for the other artists (such
37. For comment on Cousin’s influence at this stage, see as Eugene Deveria) involved in this edition of 1837. A
McWilliam, Dreams ofHappiness, pp. 25—6, and Jan preliminary drawing and a related small watercolour are
Goldstein, ‘Saying “I”: Victor Cousin, Caroline Angebert, held in the Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphiques, RF
and the Politics of Selfhood in Nineteenth-Century France’, 34,772 and 34,773.
in Michael S. Roth, Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, 53. Prosper de Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne
and the Psyche (Stanford, 1994), pp. 226-48. (sixth edition, Paris, 1842), vol.I, pp. xxiv—xxv.
38. See La Jeanne d’Arc de Paul Delaroche: Salon de 1524, 54. Fora general review ofpictorial representations of
exhibition catalogue by Marie-Pierre Foissy-Aufrere, Joan ofArc in the context of new historical documentation,
(Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, 1983). This excellent see Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise ofHistory (New
‘dossier’, compiled to celebrate the purchase of the painting York, 1995), ch.5, ‘Metamorphoses of Joan of Arc’.
for the Rouen collection, remains the only substantial recent 55. See Frank Ankersmit, ‘Statements, Texts and
published investigation of Delaroche’s work in French. Pictures’, ind Nem Philosophy ofHistory, ed. Frank
39. For Barante’s historical contribution, and in Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (London, 1995), pp. 214f.
particular his treatment of Joan of Arc, see Stephen Bann, 56. Barante, Ducs de Bourgogne, vol.III, p. 287.
The Clothing ofClio: A Study of the Representation ofHistory 57. None of the works by Delaroche held at the Chateau
in Nineteenth-century Britain and France (Cambridge, 1984), de Versailles is currently on show, and only one portrait
PP: 32-53: (General Bertrand, 1842) is available for viewing. There is,
40. Foissy-Aufrere, Jeanne d’Arc, p. 15. however, a small replica of the Duc d’Angouléme in the
41. XPD, p. 2. Museum of Draguignan.
42. See Ziff, pp. 41-2. 58. A possible motive for the visit, connected with his
43. The translation of Shakespeare was by Guizot, in research for the Princes in the Tower is discussed on p. 94.
collaboration with Amedée Pichot, whose personal 59. See Amédée Pichot, Vues pittoresques de l’Ecosse
connection with the Delaroche family is noted in the dessinées d aprés nature (Paris, 1826), p. 29. The only possible
previous chapter (p. 58). concession to local colour in this work, which was
44. For further discussion of Reyoil’s picture in relation lithographed by Lami, is a distant church tower, which may
to that of Delaroche, see Foissy-Aufrere, Jeanne d'Arc, represent Saint Giles’s Cathedral.

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60. Possibly intended for an English market, this print is (Fried, Manet’s Modernism, p. 254). This type of analysis
described as ‘sketched by Delaroche’ [sic]. could well be pursued in relation to the paintings of Granet
61. Robert Bowyer (1758-1834) was a miniature painter and the Lyon painters, particularly as they affected the
by profession, whose main claim to fame was this idea for an development of Delaroche.
illustrated edition of Hume’s /fistory of England. The major 74. Ziff, p.g8. He would have turned twenty in 1831.
English history painters, such as Smirke and Benjamin 75. Delaborde, p. 276.
West, were enlisted to supply paintings for the engravers to 76. See Illustrated London News, 5 February 1848. The
work from, and by 1806 five folios had been published. article concludes rather portentously: “The rank which M.
Delaroche could well have come across the series on his visit Delaroche holds among French artists is that of aChef’
to England in 1827. d@’Ecole’.
62. See Ziff, p. 67, for a discussion of the precise edition 77. lam indebted for this information to Dr Clive
used, and the relevant page references. Wainwright, of the Victoria and Albert Museum, who notes
Og5 Zitip. 72. that ‘there were a number of dealers/fakers in and around
64. The issue of transposition from ‘low’ to ‘high’ art Wardour Street at that date who could have made the bed
forms a commonplace of Modernist criticism, typified by and stool either as new or from old woodwork’ (letter of 9
the essays in Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in February 1996).
High and Lom, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gotnik (New 78. Godde, plate 14.
York, 1990). Lorenz Eitner’s essay for this collection singles 79. Lhid.
out the prints made by Gericault in England, and holds that 80. The patron commissioning the work was John
he ‘anticipates. . . the social realism of French artists Naylor, of Leighton Hall in Montgomeryshire, who also
working after 1848” (p.57). Of course, Delaroche’s use of commissioned the 1847 version of Napoleon at Fontainebleau
prints involves a different mechanism: his subject-matter is (see p. 251).
not ‘low life’, but on the contrary material drawn from 81. See William Hazlitt, Essays, ed. G. E. Hollingworth
English history. The fact remains that he makes systematic (London, 1926), p. 62. The essay is ‘On the conversation of
use of print sources, from the variations on Moreau le jeune authors IT.
in Joan of Arc, to the employment ofthe illustrations to 82. There is also a further print, drawn by Smirke and
Thiers in Napoleon Crossing the Alps (see p. 253). But engraved by Anker Smith, which was published in London
invariably his revisions are significant; as for Lichtenstein, in 1810 for another edition of Hume’s History of England.
this is partly a question ofadapting to a new scale, but Entitled Edward Vand the Duke ofYork Smothered in the
(unlike Lichtenstein) it is also a matter of inscribing a more Tomer, it is essentially a reconfiguration of the elements of
effective characterization. Northcote’s composition, though in this case the bed with
65. Ziff, p. 72. the sleeping princes is aligned to the right, as in Delaroche’s
66. See Fried, Manet’s Modernism, p. 59. painting.
67. ‘Cest en face de la Mort d’Elisabeth qwon sentira 83. Shakespeare, King Richard ITT, Act IV, Scene U1.
Pabus de la methode, et que le regard sera comme étourdi 84. See Catalogue de tableaux anciens, p. 24.
une sorte de fracas pittoresque. M. Delaroche 85. Quoted in Bann, Clothing ofClio, p.73.
heureusement n’etait pas homme a se meprendre 86. See Germain Bapst, Essai sur l'histoire du theatre
longtemps.’ Delaborde, p. 273. (Paris, 1893), pp. 573-4, for a telling account of Delavigne’s
68. Stendhal, diary entry for 1 January 1829, quoted in conscientious attempt to follow Delaroche’s prescriptions in
Julius Starzynski (ed.), Stendhal: Du Romantisme dans les arts his staging of Don Juan (1835). Delavigne copied a sword
(Paris, 1966), p.148. formerly in the possession of Francis I of France, which was
69. Dumas, p. 24. in the Musée d’Artillerie, and used it as a model for the
7o. The logical stage that follows this foregrounding of weapon that the French king yielded up to the Austrians
the dynamic stresses within the large Salon paintings of after the Battle of Pavia. A polemic ensued in the French
Delaroche is the observation and discussion ofthe press, only the better-informed critics being aware that the
simultaneous development ofanewer, more flexible format alienated sword, having been in Madrid for many years, was
for his smaller works. This will be attempted in the next repatriated by Murat in 1808, on the orders of Napoleon.
chapter, in connection with the ‘panoramic’ use of space. The incident proves two things: first, that the search for
71. See Alberti, De /a Peinture, translated from the Latin authenticity in historical representation was fraught with
by Jean-Louis Schefer (Paris, 1992), p. 178: ‘aut periculum difficulties, where the reference was not backed up by
remve aliquam illic admirandam demonstrevt’. verisimilitude; second, that the public disposition to judge
72. See the excellent analysis of this painting in Louis contemporary representations of history by strictly
Marin, ‘On Reading Pictures: Poussin’s Letter on Manna’, in historical standards was well entrenched by this period, at
Comparative Criticism, 4 (1982), pp. 3-18. least in part because of the new standards promoted by such
73. See the exceptional dossier on the Lyon painters in painters as Delaroche.
Les Muses de Messidor, exhibition catalogue by Marie- 87. J. Tripier Le Franc, Histoire de la vie et de la mort du
Claude Chaudonneret and others (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Baron Gros (Paris, 1880), p. 511.
Lyon, 1989). Michael Fried has recently speculated on the 88. See Michael Ann Holly, ‘Witnessing an
connection between the emergence of ‘a certain sort of Annunciation’, in The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural
religious painting in the young realist circle in the 1860s’ and Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal (Amsterdam, 1994), p. 152.
pictorial effects ‘of absorptive closure or say ofcloistering’ 89. See Catalogue de tableaux anciens, pp. 6—7.

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go. Analternative possibility, however, is that the image 102. Quoted in Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular
may signal a later episode in the life of the Virgin: the Theatre 1850-1910 (London, 1981).
Visitation. The suggestion of blue sky, implying an outdoor 103. See Ziff, pp. 131-4, for the sequence of dramatic
scene, favours this interpretation, according to which the works deriving from Jane Grey.
red-robed counterpart to the Virgin would be Elizabeth, 104. ‘Depuis vingt ans je cherche a le prouyer tout bien
mother of John the Baptist. que mal, et si je n’en ayais que trente, je leur prouyerais bien
gt. Lam grateful to Marian Campbell, of the Victoria and que j’ai raison. Autrefois les lignes d'une composition, le
Albert Museum, who helpfully answered my queries about caractere de ses figures, tout etait convenu, et l’on aurait pu
the hanging medallion(s). It resembles the silver and silver- deviner a l’avance une composition, sa couleur et son effet,
gilt reliquary pendants made in southern Germany in the en lisant le livret du salon. Aujourd’hui de nouvelles idées,
second half of the fifteenth century, one of which (featuring basees sur le simple et le vrai, doivent conduire l’artiste qui
the Annunciation) was ina French private collection by 1847 sait qu’on peut tout demander a un art qu’on ayait
and subsequently entered the Victoria and Albert (accession emmaillotte jusqu’ici dans de fausses regles au profit de ces
number 168-1906). Marian Campbell also suggests that the froides intelligences, qui ne deviennent quelque chose que
‘strange keyhold mount visible on the German photograph par transmission. A ’epoque de mon Cromivell, on m’a
of the Princes in the Tomer (illus. 49) might be ‘a Gothic lock reproche de l’avoir fait trop vrai, et maintenant cette figure
with pinnacles. . . put on the wrong side ofthe door’ (letter est devenu le type de quiconque le veut representer, soit au
of 29 August 1995). theatre, soit en sculpture, méme en Angleterre, ou ils sont
g2. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect’, in French fiers de ce grand hypocrite. Malgre tout ce qu’on pourra dire,
Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todoroy (Cambridge, je crois que j’ai raison, non pas que je defende le résultat de
1982), p. II. ma penseée, mais ma pensce elle-méme. Quoted in Louis
93. Of course, this is not to assume a crude equivalence Ulbach, ‘Paul Delaroche’, Revue de Paris, XXXVI (1857),
between ‘reality effects’ in literary and visual media. The p- 358.
point is that both the historian and the painter impel us to 105. For further discussion ofthis issue, see Bann,
imagine the threatening presence by way ofits sensory Romanticism, pp. 45—-59-
attributes, sound and light respectively. Delaroche’s 106. Heine, p.62. For the German, see Heinrich Heine,
attention to the Gothic lock (as recorded in illus. 49) further Samtliche Werke (Hamburg, 1980), vol.12, no.1, p. 35.
heightens the effect by foregrounding the security that has 107. See further discussion in Bann, Clothing of Clio,
already been violated. pp. 8-14.
94. ° . une allusion aux faits de Phistoire 108. Quoted zhid., p. 11.
contemporaine, un pieux hommage aux vaincus, une lecon a 10g. Quoted in S. S. Prawer, Heine's femish Comedy
lPadresse des vainqueurs.’ Delaborde, p. 276. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 1-2.
95. The connection is acknowledged without ambiguity 110. Heine, p. 69.
in Casimir Delavigne’s Oewvres completes (Paris, 1846), in 11. [bid., p.70.
which the third volume comprising the play has a print of . Lid.
the Princes in the Tomer by Pru’ homme as its frontispiece. 113. See Ziff, p. 106; also Beth S. Wright, ‘An Image for
96. M. Fauchier Delavigne, Casimir Delavigne intime Imagining the Past: Delacroix, Cromwell and Romantic
(Paris, 1907), pp. 168-9. Historical Painting’, Clio, 21:3 (1992), for discussion of the
g7. ‘Enfin, s'il peint les enfants d’Edouard, le moment tableau vivant derived from the work.
qu il choisit n’est point celui ou les bourreaux de Richard HI 114. Ziff, p. 108.
se precipitent sur les pauvres innocents, et etouffent leurs 115. Quoted in Fried, Manet’s Modernism, p. 223.
cris et leur yie sous les matelas et les oreillers. Non, c’est 116. Tbid., pp. 223-4.
celui ou les deux enfants, assis sur le lit qui ya devenir leur 117. The groundwork for this analysis is laid down in
tombeau, s’inquietent et frissonnent, par pressentiment, au Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and
bruit des pas de la Mort, quils ne reconnaissent pas encore, Beholder in the Age ofDiderot (Berkeley, 1980). It should be
mais que leur chien a reconnue, et quis’approche, cachée par mentioned that this work takes the Rafi of the Medusa as its
la porte de la prison, mais infiltre deja sa pale et cadavereuse horizon, while his subsequent studies of Courbet and
lumiere a travers les fentes de cette porte. Manet are located firmly in the mid-nineteenth century,
‘Il est evident que c’est un cote de art, une face de genie with important retrospective sections. The work of
qui peut etre vigoureusement attaquee, mais Delaroche is arguably one of the links that make the chain
consciencieusement défendue. Cela ne satisfait pas complete.
extrement l’artiste, mais cela plait considerablement au 118. See Carrier, High Art, p. 48.
bourgeois. Dumas, p. 26. 119. Baudelaire, Curtosites esthetiques, ed. Julien Cain
98. See Rey. John Lingard, 4 History ofEngland (Paris, 1968), p. 74.
(London, 1819), vol. IL, p. 586. 120. Ibid., p. 117.
99. Le Magasin pittoresque, X (1842), p. 49. 121. Bibliotheque de l'Institut, MS 2156, f.141. It is
100. See Cassell’s Illustrated History of England (new and difficult to imagine which work Delaroche could have been
revised edition, London, 1865-74), vol.
IL, p. 30; and Cassell’s referring to in this letter, if it were not the Zukers of the
History of England (special edition: London, ¢.1898), vol. II, Bastille, for which he had received the commission in 1830
p. 56. (see Ziff, p. 84). Between the 1831 Salon and that of 1834,
1or. See Bann, Romanticism, pp. 3-10. when Jane Grey was shown, Delaroche concentrated mainly
 PAA UME, DAES LAADR:
OF GartaE:

on small-scale works, such as the Assassination of the Duc de 146. Archives des Beaux-Arts, Academie des Beaux-
Guise. Although the highly finished Wallace Collection Arts, Proces-verbaux de ses séances, 1826—36, seance of 3
version of this work dates from 1832, it is hard to envisage its November 1832, p. 281.
intricate spatial construction as ‘masonry’. As for the 147. See Bibliotheque de l'Institut, MS 2156, f.141: letter
preparatory stages of Jane Grey, the sketch in the Whitworth dated 25 April 1832 from Delaroche to Henri Delaborde.
Gallery dates from this year, but it is unlikely that Delaroche 148. Academie des Beaux-Arts, Proces-verbaux, 1826—
contemplated working on the final tableau as early as the 36, pp. 328, 331ff.
spring of 1832. 149. Ibid., p. 436: ‘M. Paul de la Roche fait deux lectures
122. See A. Jal, Les Causeries du Louvre: Salon de 1833 al’Academie de diverses propositions qui entre autres objets
(Paris, 1833), p. OI. sont relatifs a Petat genéral des Beaux-Arts et renferment
123. Heine, p. 82. d@importantes considerations sur leur culture et
124. See the stimulating essay by Segolene Le Men, particulierement sur le systeme d’exposition des ouvrages au
‘Printmaking as Metaphor for Translation: Philippe Burty Salon du Louvre’
and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in the Second Empire’, in Art 150. /bid., p. 439: ‘“Chacune de ces commissions sera
Criticism and tts Institutions in Nineteenth-century France, ed. spécialement chargeée de faire un rapport motive, de maniere
Michael R. Orwicz (Manchester, 1994), pp. 88-108. que Academie puisse donner son avis sur tous ce qui doit
125. Jal, Salon de 1833, p. 91. contribuer au progres et au perfectionnement des
126. Quoted in Wright, ‘An Image for Imagining the differentes parties des Beaux-Arts.’
Past’, p. 254. 151. See Ziff, p. 165.
127. ‘La téte coupée de Charles ler, la paille qui va boire le 152. Jean-Nicholas Huyot (1780—1840) was at the School
sang de Jane Grey dépassent peut-étre la limite des vérites of Rome between 1807 and 1812, and undertook during this
utiles” Delaborde, p. 279. period the restoration of the Temple of Fortuna at
128. The account of Delaroche’s influence on his more Praeneste. He held the chair of history ofarchitecture at the
important pupils remains to be written: useful pointers to Ecole des Beaux-Arts frm 1822; the design that he
his importance for Couture are provided in Albert Boime, submitted for finishing the Arc de Triomphe ofthe Etoile
Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (New Haven, 1980), was turned down, and his project for the Neo-classical
PP. 71, 313. church of Saint Charles in the Faubourg Saint-German was
129. Francois Guizot, L’Histoire de ’'Angleterre racontee a obstructed by the July Revolution of 1830 (the Gothic
mes petits-enfants (Paris, 1827), vol.
II, p. 152. church ofSainte Clotilde was later erected on the same site).
130. XPD, p.7. See entry in Ch. Bauchal, Nouveau dictionnaire des architectes
131. Horace de Viel-Castel, ‘Cromwell’, in L’4rtiste, 1 frangais (Paris, 1887).
(1831), p. 269. 153. Ary Scheffer, p. 35.
132. Heine, p. 81. 154. See Ziff, pp. 130-4, for a succinct summary of
133. Ziff, p. 116. critical reactions.
134. Quoted in Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, “The 155. Pichot, Vues pittoresques, p. 51: the text has Mary
juste milieu and Thomas Couture, in Romanticism and saying to Melville, ‘why do you remain with the Queen who
Realism: The Mythology ofNineteenth Century Art (London is deposed, condemned, with she who has perhaps no more
and Boston, 1984). p. 117. than a few moments to live?’.
135. See Stephen Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art: A 156. XPD, p.8.
Critical History (London, 1994), pp. 191-6. 157. She can be seen, in her costume as Richard, Duke of
136. Ibid., p. 193. York, in a group portrait of the sociétaires of the Comedie
137. McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness, p. 161. Boime Frangaise by Edmond Geffroy, dated 1840: this is illustrated
describes Delaroche’s a/e/ier as ‘a kind ofintellectual forum in Pierre Dux, La Comedie Frangaise (Paris, 1980), p. 218.
where all the latest ideas were bandied about, including 158. Itis possible that Delaroche introduced the sword in
Fourierism and Saint-Simonism” (7homas Couture, p.71). this sketch because ofthe tradition that Anne Boleyn had
138. See Ary Scheffer 1795-1858, exhibition catalogue by requested to be beheaded in this way.
Leo Ewals, Musee de la Vie Romantique (Paris, 1996), p. 47. 159. Honore de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin (Paris, 1955),
139. See pp. 111, 228. Di2z
140. Baudelaire, Curiosités, p. 67. 160. Heine, p. 161. Sir Hudson Lowe was the English
141. Delaroche’s technique seems to have been, at the governor of Saint Helena, entrusted with the task of
least, exceptionally sound. When the Hemucycle of the Ecole guarding Napoleon in his second exile.
des Beaux-Arts was partially destroyed by fire in December 161. The title Dauphine was given to the wife of the
1855, it was at first feared that Delaroche’s vast mural Dauphin, the heir to the French throne, and in the
painting would be irreparable. It was soon demonstrated revolutionary period, to which the drawing refers, the
that this was far from the case. Duchesse d’Angouleme would not have had a right to this
142. Ary Scheffer, p. 83. title. However, it appears to have been customary to refer to
143. See LAR, p. 442 and plate 75. her in these terms after 1824, when her husband (the son of
144. Ziff, p. 279. Charles X) was heir to the throne.
145. See Mirecourt, pp. 34—6. The king’s reported 162. XPD, p. 8. Although the question is still disputed, it
motive was that such a concession would make it necessary seems likely that she was executed in the open air, near the
to receive Madame Ingres, ‘a former cook’. Tower church, on a specially constructed dais.

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163. Quoted in J. Tripier le Franc, Histoire de la vie et de la 33136. Iam grateful to Stephen Duffy for pointing out the
mort du Baron Gros (Paris, 1880), p. 510. interest of this work.
164. See Le Magasin pittoresque, I (1834), pp. 90-91. 177: Cousin, Du Vrat, p. 479.
165. Roth, Rediscovering History, p. 190. 178. See Le Magasin pittoresque, Ul (1834), pp. 273-4.
166. Eisenman writes summarily of the ‘bathetic 179. See Alfred de Vigny, Cing-Mars (Paris, 1980), p. 137.
genre historique of Delaroche’ in Nineteenth Century Art, 180. Godde, plate 19.
p. 225. 181. General Pierre Boyer (17721851) was a Napoleonic
167. Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to soldier who rallied to Napoleon during the roo days, and
Delacroix (Cambridge, 1984), p. 73. Thomas Crow reads the later dabbled in painting, before entering the service of the
picture ina diametrically opposite way, insisting that ‘the Egyptian ruler, Mahomet Ali; on returning to France in the
tribute of supreme intensity is conspicuously withheld from early years ofthe July Monarchy, he was appointed
the patriarchal hero and transferred to the lowest ranking Inspecteur-geneéral de gendarmerie, which no doubt gave
personage in the picture, who happens to be a woman’. See his appearance as a guard in Strafford a contemporary
‘A Male Republic: Bonds between Men in the Art and Life resonance.
of Jacques-Louis David’, in Gill Perry and Michael 182. His face, in profile above the white ruff, is strongly
Rossington, Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-century reminiscent of that of Sully, in Coupin de la Couperie’s
Artand Religion (Manchester, 1994), p. 215. Neither reading, Sully Showing his Grandson the Monument Containing the
of course, conflicts with my interpretation of Jane Grey in Heart ofHenri [Vat La Fleche (see LAR, p. 355). In Bann,
relation to Brutus. Romanticism, pp. 68-74, I suggest that the prototype for the
168. See Hans Vlieghe, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig elderly figure is Plato, in David’s Death of Socrates (New
Burchard (London and New York, 1973), U1, pp. 39-41. York, Metropolitan Museum).
169. See Ziff, p. 344, for illustrations. 183. XPD, p.9.
17o. The Saint Justina is the subject of acharming small 184. Delaroche was in the habit of sketching
copy by Lord Leighton, completed in the 1850s and now architectural details during his travels, and his drawings in
hanging at Leighton House. Although the mode of the Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphiques, include
execution is different, the posture of this female martyr, several labelled sketches of Gothic architecture, such as
with outstretched arms, is more directly akin to Jane Grey Rouen (RF 34 889) and La Charite (FR 35 016).
than that of the muscular Saint George. Although 185. ‘. . . deux mains blanches, aristocratiques et
Delaroche would not have had the opportunity to see this tremblantes, passant a travers les barreaux de cette feneétre.
painting, it is conceivable that he put together features from Dumas, p. 26.
both these martyrdoms by Rubens, his knowledge of the 186. Heine, Werke, 13/1, p. 148.
Uffizi work being only indirect. 187. ‘Le Strafford afflige Voeil par l'abus des noirs, qui ont
171. Bryson, Tradition and Desire, p. 6. un facheux ton de cirage. . . Ces défauts disparaissaient a la
172. See Alex Hogg, Fox's Original and Complete Book of gravure, qui ne laisse voir que la disposition habile de la
Martyrs (London, ?1782). composition.’ Gautier, p. 79.
173. It is worth pointing out that none ofthe previous 188. See note 52. The sketch showing Charles
representations of Lady Jane Grey to date had shown her descending the stairs is close to the Joan of Arc in its
execution. Visual recreations of her life, such as they were, disposition of the crowd around a central victim figure
tended to displace this horrific episode with the scenes of (Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphiques, RF 35 065).
her earlier imprisonment, in particular the one in which she 189. Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphiques, RF 35
refuses to take leave of her young husband, Guildford 067.
Dudley. 190. LAR, plate 76. Robert-Fleury is known to have
174. See ‘Le Musée des Augustins au tournant du siecle’, assisted Delaroche with the Takers ofthe Bastille (completed
Journal des collections, 6 (Toulouse, 1991): the installation of in 1839). See Ziff, p. 85, note 11.
the Musée des Augustins in the former church ofthe 1gt. Godde, plate 23.
Augustinian friars took place in 1794, making it the second 192. Heine, p. 82.
museum in France after the Louvre; nevertheless the 193. ‘Ici, du moins, l’artiste fait ce qu'il veut; il rend sa
curators complained incessantly of the inconvenience of the conception dune maniere absolue: le maitre apparait.
ecclesiastical buildings, and between 1830 and 1835 Gautier, p. 79.
occupied themselves with constructing a “Temple des Arts’ 194. Heine, Werke, 13/1, p. 148: ‘Herr Delaroche ist der
in the middle of the church. Hofmaler aller gekopften Majestaten.
175. For Lami’s close relationship to Demidoff, see 195. See Ziff, p. 158.
Francis Haskell, ‘Anatole Demidoff and the Wallace 196. Tripier Le Franc, Baron Gros, p. 545: ‘si les
Collection’, in Anatole Demidoff, Prince ofSan Domato, critiques inconsideres, méconnaissant les chefs-d’oeuvre
exhibition catalogue, Wallace Collection (London, 1994), dont il a enrichi l’école frangaise, n’ont pas craint
pp. 15-16. Lami’s delightful watercolour of the Sa/on ofthe d’abreuver d’amertume les derniers jours de cette utile et
Countess Somailoff, dated 1840 (and anticipating an oil glorieuse vie, la posterité, qui n’est jamais ingrate, le
painting of the same date) shows Lami himself, Demidoff vengera, par son admiration, de ce coupable oubli et de
and Delaroche among the habitues ofthis Franco-Russian cette persecution.’
Salon. 197. See David O’Brien, ‘Antoine Gros in Italy’, The
176. Louvre, Department des Arts Graphiques, RF Burlington Magazine, 137 (1995), p- 660.
 PAUL DEE ANKa@)) Gebice

CHAPTER THREE 15. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London, 1991), pp. 14—
1. It would require a separate study to trace this far- mn

reaching effect on the European painting of the mid- 16. Tbid., p. 174.
century. ‘Two striking examples must suffice here. Karl von 17. The work is catalogued in XPD, item 132, as ‘Portrait
Piloty’s Sent before Wallenstemn’s Corpse (1855; Munich, Neue de M. Desbordes, peintre’ (black pencil drawing), with a
Pinakotek) is a hybrid of Crommel/ and the Assassination of the conjectural date of 1829. This date is certainly wrong, as
Duc de Guise. William Lindsay Windus’s Shaxton, the Bishop Desbordes died in 1827. It is more likely that it dates from
of Salisbury, Interviewing Asker in Prison (1849; Liverpool, c.1822, when Delaroche drew his other fellow lodger, the
Walker Art Gallery) is a variant of Joan of Arc, while the painter Schall.
same artist’s Study for Cranmer Endeavouring to Obtain a 18. Fernand Calmettes, Etat general des tapisseries de la
Confession from Catherine Howard (same date and same manufacture des Gobelins . . . Periode du dix-neuvieme siécle
gallery) represents an unsuccessful attempt to transpose the (Paris, 1912), p. 411: the private comments of Delecluze are
composition into a vertical relationship. For both of these quoted in Ziff, p. 61.
artists, it is clear that Delaroche created genuinely generic 1g. Calmettes, Gobelins, p. 414.
possibilities for an infinite number ofhistorical subjects. 20. Lbid.
2. See the dispute about the sword of Francis I 21. The point was emphasized in Delécluze’s Salon
mentioned in the previous chapter (p. 284, note 86). review, where Delaroche was held to have captured the
3. Lam indebted to Bernard Lassus for this remark. essence of modern heroism: see Ziff, p. 61.
4. For material on the remarkable critical career of 22. The print byJules Francois is likely to date from
Charles Blanc, see Neil McWilliam, Dreams ofHappiness: before 1850. Paul Mantz later hailed him as an ‘excellent
Social Art and the French Left, 1830-1850 (Princeton, 1993), translator of Delaroche’. See Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3 (July—
esp. pp. 280-89. Blanc particularly commended the way in Sept. 1859), p. 25.
which Ary Scheffer appeared to revive ‘the long-standing 23. For discussion of the difficulty of ascertaining which
tradition of prioritizing content in favor of apreoccupation ofthe possible saints of this name Delaroche intended to
with technique meaningful only to a privileged minority’ represent, see Ziff, p. 122.
(p.281). 24. Although Winterhalter’s portrait dates from 1845,
5. Charles Blanc, ‘Le Genie captif: dessin posthume de the group of the Queen with her elder daughters, to the right
Paul Delaroche’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 (1859), p- 79- of the composition, clearly accords with the characterization
6. See the print in Departement des Estampes, of the three women in the earlier composition.
Bibliotheque Nationale (1841; 1260); the drawing is 25. Marian Campbell has suggested that these may well
confusingly identified in the catalogue of the Departement be composite creations rather than direct copies, the
des Arts Graphiques, Louvre (RF 35 126), as “Trois monstrance seeming to combine ‘a German or Swiss base
personnages’. The recent appearance of an oil sketch ofthis with a Spanish-style top’ and the jardiniére possibly
subject attributed to Delaroche cannot be accepted without ‘inspired by a birdcage minus its top’ (letter of 29August
question. Although Delaroche undoubtedly produced the 1995). Delaroche could well have made drawings after the
drawing, the unsigned oil sketch may very well be the work collections of such objects that were being formed at that
of Beranger. See Nadia Tscherny and Guy Stair-Sainty, time, in particular that of Alexandre du Sommerard, which
Romance and Chivalry (New York, 1996), pp. 121, 257. opened to the public in the Hotel de Cluny in the early
7. Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphiques, RF 35 1830s.
423. The drawing combines the different features of 26. Catalogue de tableaux anciens, p. 22, 1tem 195.
Delaroche’s drawing style noted by Blanc: ideas ‘sometimes 27. See ‘Le Livre @heures d’Anne de Bretagne’, Gazette
indicated with a rapid stroke, sometimes expressed by a des Beaux-Arts, 6 (April—June 1860), p. 154.
careful contour, by very intentional and deeply felt 28. Ibid., p. 142.
modelling’ (‘tantot indiquées par un trait rapide, tantot 29. Delaroche was perhaps not unaware that Anne de
exprimées par un contour attentif, par un modele trés-voulu Bretagne had been betrothed, in her childhood, to the elder
et tres ressenti’). Gazette des Beaux-Arts, (1859), p.79- of the Princes in the Tower, son and heir of Edward IV.
8. See Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, ‘Historicism and 30. See De David a Delacroix, exhibition catalogue,
“Heritage” in the Louvre, 1820-40: From the Musée Grand Palais (Paris, 1974) pp. 369-70.
Charles X to the Galerie d’Apollon’, Art History, 14/4 (1991), 31. Lbid., pp. 309-11.
p. 507; Delaroche’s motive for abandoning the commission 32. Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des
is, however, given erroneously here as his ‘preference’ for Manuscrits, NAF 16800, f.136.
easel painting. 33. See De David a Delacroix, pp. 385-6.
g. Blanc, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 (1859), p. 81. 34. Delaborde, p. 311.
10. See Paul Duro (ed.), Rhetoric ofthe Frame 35. NAF 16800, ff.67—70. The work that he asks to be
(Cambridge, 1996), pp. 44-62, for a thorough treatment of allowed to see in the studio, ina letter of 18 June 1836, is
this issue. Saint Cecilia (illus. 129), of which he has apparently already
11. Blanc, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 (1859), p. 81. received a good report.
12. Blanc suggests that the ‘Genie captif’ drawing 36. It is worth recalling that, at this point of the city’s
illustrated in his article relates to this project. history, the collection of paintings belonging to the civic
13. Delaborde, p. 291. authorities was housed in the Maison Carrée, a Roman
14. Blanc, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 (1859), p. 79. temple.

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37. Acopy of Calamatta’s engraving is recorded as having 58. See German Bapst, Essai sur ‘histoiredu théatre (Paris,
been sold for 41 francs in a sale of engravings in 1859: see 1893), p- 544 for details of the information offered by the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2 (April-June 1859), p. 185. elderly M. Lormier; also p. 548 for further information on
38. The long delay is taken as a signal of Delaroche’s the maquettes.
dissatisfaction with the role taken by Thiers in the 59. The drawing bears a dedication on the back: ‘offert a
unfortunate conclusion of the Madeleine project in Virginie Bourbier par son amie Anais le 18 Oct. 1836’; it also
Mirecourt, pp. 27-8. has a scribbled figure, possibly ‘34’, which might represent
39. Charles de Remusat, Mémoires de ma vie (Paris, 1960), the date of the gift. Delaroche’s informal signature, ‘Paul D.’,
vol III, p. 345. almost certainly indicates that it was given to a friend.
40. The way in which the arms are crossed suggests 60. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres completes, ed. Jean Massin
either that Remusat was left-handed, or that Delaroche (Paris, 1970), vol. III, 2, plate XX.
worked from a mirror image. 61. See entry in Dictionnaire de biographie francaise,
41. NAF 16800, f.151. vol. XII, p. 1394.
42. Blanc, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, (1859), p. 83. 62. See Ziff, p. 95.
43. Delaborde, p. 294. 63. See Ziff, p. 95; critical responses to the two works are
44. The detailed arrangements for the installation of also reviewed on pp. 94-5.
these compositions were spelled out to Delaroche in a letter 64. Delaborde, p. 280; also Gautier, p. 78.
from Huve (the architect in charge of the completion of the 65. Mirecourt, pp. 12-13; Dumas, p. 27.
Madeleine from 1828), which dates from 30 April 1835. See 66. XPD, p.6.
p. 202 and p. 290, note 112. 67) SEDI p. 7:
45. Halevy, p. 259. 68. ‘Oubliez votre amitie en regardant ma pauvre Jane
46. Olivier Merson, in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, VU Grey et dites-moi quand vous aurez un moment ce que vous
(October-December 1860), p. 194. pensez de ma tragedie. Letter of Paul Delaroche to Alfred
47. Quoted in Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, de Vigny, dated February 1834, in Alfred de Vigny,
Romanniism and Realism: The Mythology ofNineteenth Correspondance, ed. Madeleine Ambriere (Paris, 1991),
Century Art (London, 1984), pp. 118-19. voL IL, p. 318.
48. For further details on this work, see Ein Hamburger 69. For the possible influence of Vigny’s religious ideas
sammelt in London, exhibition catalogue by Helmut R. on Delaroche, see the next chapter, p. 259.
Leppien, Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, 1884), p. 31. jo. Alfred de Vigny, Oeuvres completes, ed. F.
The collector celebrated in this exhibition, known in Baldensperger (Paris, 1965), vol.II,pp. 16-17.
England as Sir Henry Schroder, is an interesting example of 71. Lbid., p.333.-
the second generation of Delaroche collectors. In addition to 72. Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphiques, RF
Peter the Great, he also owned a reduction of Napoleon at 1453; the work is dated 1826 and illustrated in Ziff, p. 346. A
Fontainebleau (p.32). further detail is that the two conspirators have no hats, and
49. Dumas, p. 25; Gautier, p. 8o. It is crucial to note that are attended by a visually confusing cluster of pikes.
Gautier makes the judgement in a throw-away line at the 73. Heine, pp. 63-4.
end of his review, whereas Dumas makes a great deal more 74. Vigny, Oeuvres, vol.II, p. 333.
of it, and is perhaps the source of the very general currency 75. See Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphiques,
of the comparison in the period. Dumas concedes that studies 35 449 and 35 456. In the painting of Gros’s studio by
Delaroche is ‘stronger as a painter than Casimir Delavigne A. Masse, the male model is posing with a stick in a closely
as a dramatist’ (p.25); he has also worked out a more comparable way.
elaborate system of pairing contemporary painters with 76. See Nicolas Milovanoyic, ‘Deux tableaux de Paul
well-known writers, associating Delacroix with Hugo and Delaroche’ (unpublished Memoire de maitrise, Universite
Horace Vernet with himself. Paris IV), ch. II.
50. Casimir Delavigne, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1846), 77. Ziff, pp. 93-4-
vol. IH, p. 143. 78. Milovanovic, figs 29—32.
51. Lbid., pp. 133-4. 79. Heine, p. 64.
52. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay 80. Lbid., pp. 65-6.
upon the Limits ofPoetry and Painting, translated by E. 81. Quoted in Ziff, p. 87.
Frothingham (New York, 1969). 82. See Milovanovic, ch.I.
53. Stendhal, Oeuvres completes, Melanges ITT (Geneva, 83. See, for example, Delacroix’s closely contemporary
1972), p- 29. Agsassination ofthe Bishop of Liége (1831; Louvre), illustrating
54. Hubert Damisch, L’Origine de la perspective (Paris, an episode from Scott’s Quentin Durmard, and the even more
1987), pp. 183 ff. brilliant oil sketch for the work (Musée des Beaux-Arts,
55. Lbid., p. 208. Lyon).
56. Svetlana Alpers, review of Dutch seventeenth- 84. The work is in the Musee Fabre, Montpellier, in all
century painting exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, likelihood. Delaborde referred to an early study that had
in London Review of Books, V\/21 (15 November 1984), been stolen, and this watercolour corresponds closely with
pp. 21-2. what might have been expected in such a preliminary
57. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism (Chicago and study (see WCC, p. 116). Its main compositional defect,
London, 1996), p. 296. compared with the version of 1832 (illus. 103), is to situate
 PAUL DE LAK
OG EE

the body of the Duc de Guise too high, so that it appears (Princeton, 1996), ch.I, ‘Meissonier at the Pantheon’,
to float. especially pp. 28-30.
85. Its first showing is mistakenly attributed to the 1834 104. See /ngres catalogue, p. 204; Halevy, pp. 265-6.
Salon in WCC, p. 116. 105. Henriquel-Dupont’s special affinity for Delaroche’s
86. Ziff, p. 147. work was noted at the time. His talent was an ‘essentially
87. See Ingres, exhibition catalogue, Petit Palais (Paris, temperate’ one, which suited a painter equally personifying
1967), p. 248, for a brief account of Ingres’s difficulties in ‘the horrors of extremes’: see Gazette des Beaux-Arts, |
completing the commission. (January—March 1859), p. 188. For the effect of photography
88. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, p. 495; also Courbet’s on the traditional printmakers, see the excellent article by
Realism (Chicago and London, 1990), p. 37. Ségoléne Le Men, ‘Printmaking as a Metaphor for
89. Although Daumier (born in 1808) was at this stage Translation: Philippe Burty and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts
only on the fringes of artistic society, his precocious skills in in the Second Empire’, in Art Criticism and its Institutions in
lithography often drew him to the Left Bank. His home on Nineteenth-century France, ed. Michael R. Orwicz
the Ile Saint Louis would have made it easy for him to (Manchester, 1994), p. 93.
frequent the quarter around the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. 106. In the person of Robert Jefferson Bingham,
go. See Manet 1832-1883, exhibition catalogue, Grand Delaroche was fortunate to have a photographer capable of
Palais (Paris, 1983), p. 195. exciting the same enthusiasm for his ‘translations’ as
gt. Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Death at Work: A Case Study in Henriquel-Dupont in the domain of printmaking. See the
Constitutive Blanks in Nineteenth-century Painting, remarkable brief article by Theophile Gautier, ‘L’Oeuvre de
Representations, X (spring 1985), p. 114. Paul Delaroche photographiee’, reprinted in La
92. bid., p.115. Photographie en France, ed. Andre Rouille (Paris, 1989),
93. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision pp. 241-3. Gautier credits the photography of Bingham as
and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, having ‘even in the excess of its zeal changed into very fine
and London, 1990), p. 127; see also p. 22 for the ‘radically pictures quite mediocre canvases’ (p.243).
different visual language’ of Delaroche and other 107. Henry Lemonnier, ‘La Peinture murale de Paul
contemporaries. Delaroche a PHémicycle de ?Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Gazette
94. Sadakichi Hartmann, The Valiant Knights of Daguerre des Beaux-Arts (1917), pp. 173-92: quotation from p. 182.
(Berkeley, 1978), p. 71. 108. Dumas, p. 29.
95. Kemp, ‘Death at Work’, p. 120. tog. Mirecourt, pp. 26-8.
96. There were in fact three films bearing this title in the 110. See WCC, pp. 112-13: of the numerous drawings
early years of the French cinema: the first realized by for the project in the Departement des Arts Graphiques,
Lumiere at the end of 1897 and lasting a minute; the second Louvre, at least two bear the signature of Thiers (RF 34 969
by Pathe in rgo2 and slightly longer in duration; the third and RF 34 955).
presented in 1908 by Film @’Art and acknowledged at the tit. Le Magasin pittoresque, vol.1l (1834), p. 50.
time as an important landmark in the history of the cinema. 112. See Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des
While the first two productions are little more than fableaux Manuscrits, NAF 16800, f.107: letter from J. J. Huve, dated
vivants —in which the accessories relating to Delaroche’s 30 April 1835. Huve reports that he has spoken to Horace
picture are more than evident — the third is truer to his Vernet about the project and ascertained his opinions.
legacy in attempting a representation of history within the 113. Le Magasin pittoresque, vol.V1 (1838), 14, p. 106.
specific constraints of film. The critic Adolphe Brisson 114. Quoted in Alain Bonnet, ‘Une Histoire de l’art
remarked after the first performance: ‘{The cinema] aspires illustree: ?Hemicycle de VEcole des Beaux-arts par Paul
not only to reproduce current affairs but to animate the past, Delaroche’, /istoire de lart, 33/34 (May 1966), p. 18. This
to reconstruct the great events of History, through the useful article represents the first serious attention devoted to
performance of the actor and the evocation of atmosphere the analysis of the Hemicycle since the nineteenth century.
and milieu, See Richard Abel, French Film: Theory and 115. bid.
Criticism 1907-1939 (Princeton, 1988), vol.I, p. 51, for 116. See /ngres catalogue, pp. 204-06. Michelangelo also
Brisson’s article. The earlier two versions are featured in achieves a position among the ‘Ancients’.
Georges Sadoul, Les pionniers du cinéma (Paris, 1948), vol.I1, 117. Bonnet, ‘Une Histoire de Part illustre, p. 21.
Pp- 504-05. 118. For further consideration of this point, see Stephen
97. Godde, plate 54. Bann, ‘Generating the Renaissance, or the Individualization
g8. Barante, Ducs de Bourgogne, vols WHI. of Culture, in The Point ofTheory, ed. Mieke Bal and Inge E.
99. Lbid., voll, p. 113. Boer (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 145-54.
too. ‘Le peintre de PHemuicycle du palais des Beaux-Arts 119. Bonnet, ‘Une Histoire de lart illustre, p. 24.
et de la Mort du duc de Guise a eu le privilege de plaire a la 120. Ibid.
foule en meme temps qu’aux juges difficiles.” Delaborde, 121. See p. 76.
p. 261. 122. See Camillo Bonnard, Costwmi estrattt da’ monumentt
tor. Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des 1piu autentict di pittura e scultura con testo istorico e descrittivo
Manuserits, NAF 16800, f.72, letter of to December 1841. (second edition, Rome, 1828), vol.
IL,plate 91 and p. 185. As
102. Charles Blanc, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, VU mentioned previously, Delaroche possessed a copy of the
(October-December 1860), p. 354. French edition of 1829: see Catalogue de tableaux anciens. . .
103. See Mare Gotlieb, The Plight ofEmulation de M. Paul Delaroche (Paris, 1857), p. 22.

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123. It is not today assumed that he must have visited for an interesting account of Delaroche’s encouragemnt of
Flanders, and he may well have become acquainted with the the young painter.
technique while studying in Naples. 3. It was also developed by Delaroche’s willingness to
124. ‘Car ce sont les hommes que Delaroche voulait provide replicas and reduced versions of his major works for
peindre, et non de purs esprits. I] les montre sur la terre, et the international market.
non dans le ciel. Halevy, p. 264. 4. ‘On dit que mes derniers ouvrages sont les meilleurs,
125. ‘La loge est ouverte, et je ne doute pas de son bon je me fais un progrés —l’Italie fera le reste” Bibliotheque de
effet. Votre peinture y gagnera un point de vue genéral que Institut, MS 2156, f.142, letter dated 14 July 1843: ‘Hier j’ai
celui d’en bas, et la salle elle-meme y gagnera en espace et en signe mon Herodiade. Je crois que vous n’en serez pas
aspect’: Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des mecontent.’ (ibid.)
Manuscrits, NAF 16800, f.40, letter of 22 June 1856 from 5. ‘Je me suis determine a rester encore un an ici. Ce
Felix Duban. climat a fait miracle, et j’espere qu’apres un long et doux
126. See Bernard Comment, Le X/Xe Siecle des temps d’exil je vous ramenerai un quasi|. . .] a Pabri de
panoramas (Paris, 1993), p. 22. nouvelles rechutes.’ (ibid., f.153. letter of 2 June 1853).
127. Lam indebted for this information to Michael 6. See P. Grunchec, Les Concours des Prix de Rome 1797-
Pritchard. 1563 (Paris, 1986), vol.II, pp. 146-9.
128. Comment, Le X/Xe Siecle des panoramas, p. 82. For 7. ‘Vous croyez bien aimer votre fils, eh bien je ’'aime
Delaroche’s contact with Alexander von Humboldt, see the peut-étre plus que vous, je le ferai marcher dans la bonne
two letters addressed to him in Bibliotheque Nationale, yoie’: Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des
Departement des Manuscrits, NAF 16800, ff.104—06. In Manuscrits, NAF 16800, ff.75—6, letter from M. Hebert
the first (undated), Humboldt alludes discreetly to the pere, 20 March 1844. It is from this period that Delaroche’s
favour which Delaroche enjoys at the Prussian court: ‘par striking drawing of the young Hebert (later edited as a
la colline historique de Sans Souci votre nom est souvent lithograph by E. Pirodon) dates; the drawing is in the
prononce avec cette méme admiration que je proteste collection of the Musee Hebert, Paris.
depuis tant d’anneées, qui part du coeur auquel parlent vos 8. See Le Petit Journal, edition relating to the exhibition,
creations dans les arts’. This letter, anticipating the second Hommage a Paul Delaroche, no.143 (1984), for several extracts
dated 23 January 1850, was no doubt the prelude to from letters documenting this stay.
Delaroche’s reception at the Prussian court in the course g. See Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des
of his German journey of 1849/50. Manuscrits, NAF 16800, ff.go—91, for a letter from Hebert
129. See Etude d apres nature: 1gth Century Photographs in dated 11 March 1850, which mingles the two elements
Relation to Art, exhibition catalogue by Ken Jacobson remarkably well.
(Petches Bridge, 1996), p. 122, where Louis Figuier’s 10. Le Petit Journal, 143, p. [4].
admiring review is mentioned. 11. The moving description can be found in Halevy,
130. See ibid., for the reproduction of a print of p- 273-
Bingham’s Hemicycle photograph, annotated with names of 12. For discussion of this work, see Ziff, pp. 211-12.
artists and provided with pinholes for study purposes. 13. The title, Jeune fille dans une vasque, was used for the
131. The first account of the occasion when Delaroche is related small work in the Pourtales collection at the 1857
reported to have made his famous exclamation (‘La peinture retrospective of Delaroche’s work. Ziff has however
est morte a dater de ce jour’) is in Gaston Tissandier, Les mistranslated the word vasque, and I amend the English title
Merveilles de la photographie (Paris, 1874), p. 62. It is possible to Girl ina Basin later in this chapter.
that Tissandier may have been relying on a prior printed 14. Acquisitions et restaurations récentes, Musée des Beaux-
source, but this has not yet been discovered. Arts et d’Archeologie de Besangon, Collection du Musee
132. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of No.6 (Besangon, 1984), item 221,
the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (London, 1975), 15. Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des Estampes,
p. 132. De 166a, print by A. Blanchard after painting by Delaroche
133. Lbid., p. 202. (location unknown).
34. Donald Preziosi, Rethinking
Art History: Meditations 16. Mirecourt is obyiously right in scotching the
on a Coy Science (New Haven and London, 1989), p. 66. rumour, apparently rife in newspapers ‘for thirty years’, that
135. Lbid., p.69. the Saint herself was based on Louise Vernet. See
Mirecourt, p. 19.
17. The detail is provided in the account of Delaroche’s
CHAPTER FOUR
life in the Nouvelle Biographie (c.1850).
1. See Ziff, pp. 84—5. The other work in the series which 18. The painting is lost, but a print, engraved by Girard
achieved completion was by Jean-Victor Schnetz: entitled and published by Goupil, is in the collection of the Musee
Combat between the People and Royal Troops in the Place de Goupil.
Gréve July 28, 1830, it was shown in the Salon of 1834. 19. Quoted in Le Petit Journal, 143, p. [3]: letter of3
‘Together with Delaroche’s work, it has recently been placed October 1840 in the collection of theMusee Hebert, Paris.
on display at the Petit Palais. 20. Papiers d'Ingres, Collections graphiques du Musce
2. See Ziff, pp. 183-4. For Gerome’s role as an assistant d'Ingres, No.14 (1995), item 76; also /ngres, exhibition
on Charlemagne, see Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and catalogue, Petit Palais (Paris, 1967), pp. 280-81.
Work ofJean-Leon Gerdme (London, 1986), p. 30; also p. 31, 21. Lbid., p. 280.

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22. See WCC, pp. 110-11. 49. The drawing in question is RF 35 087.
23. Ibid., p. 111. 50. For Gleyre’s Le Soir, see LAR, pp. 393-4: the
24. See Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and rapprochement of the work with Delaroche’s Gir/,
Other Works 1921-1945 (London, 1975), p. 285. particularly at the Nantes showing of this exhibition, greatly
5. Lbid., p. 218. favoured the present comparison. For Delecluze’s criticism,
26. See the further discussion of this issue in Stephen and the account of Gleyre’s response to the Gluck opera, see
Bann, ‘Generating the Renaissance, or the Individualization Michel Thevoz, L’Académisme et ses fantasmes (Paris, 1980),
of Culture, in The Point ofTheory, ed. Mieke Bal and Inge E. pp. 104, 107-08.
Boer (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 145-54. 51. Charles de Remusat, Mémoires de ma vie (Paris, 1960),
27. Balzac, La Peau de chagrin (Paris, 1955), pp. 38, 42. vol.III, pp. 313-21.
iS) oo See Bann, ‘Generating the Renaissance’, pp. 152-3. 52. See Complete Peerage (London, 1949), vol. XI, p. 439.
29. See note 4. 53. Godde, plate 25.
30. Ziff, p. 380. 54. See De David a Delacroix, exhibition catalogue,
31. See Puvis de Chavannes, exhibition catalogue, Grand Grand Palais (Paris, 1974), item 36bis (tipped-in sheet,
Palais (Paris, 1976), p. 46. unpaginated). Although the original painting entered the
32. For the reception of Herodias, see Ziff, p. 206. From collection of the Duke of Hamilton, a replica bearing the
this account, it appears that the asking price of 16,000 francs same date was retained by David until shortly before his
was too high for the city of Ghent. However the listing in the death in 1825. This was probably the basis of the
1857 catalogue (XPD, p. 36) unambiguously attributes the engraving by Laugier, which Delaroche could also have
work to their museum. used.
33. See Ziff, p. 380, for an illustration. 55. ‘P. Delaroche, en entrant dans la salle d’assemblee de
34. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London, l'Institut, frappe du pied et regarde tout le monde avec un
1987), pp. 252-3. air qui semble dire: “Je connais la difficulté qui vous occupe;
35. Ziff describes Jules-Claude Ziegler’s work, Judith je vais arranger tout cela.” Avec cet homme, on ne doit
with the Head of Holofernes (Salon of 1847) as ‘equally jamais étre inquiet.’ Quoted in G. Chesneau and C.
forward-looking’ in this respect (p.206). But Ziegler’s work Metzger, Les Oeuvres du Musee des Beaux-Arts (Angers,
is more conventionally Caravaggesque in its conception. 1934), Pp. 210.
36. See Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement des 56. See P.-Andrée Lemoisne, Eugéne Lami (Paris, 1912),
Manuscrits, NAf 16800, f.102. Lagree with the view of p. too. The watercolour in question, illustrated in
Stephen Duffy, curator at the Wallace Collection, that this Lemoisne’s book, also appears in Nineteenth Century
work is more accurately described as ‘painted for than European Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours, sale
‘commissioned by’ the Marquess of Hertford. See WCC, catalogue (London, Sotheby’s, 1996), p. 15; Delaroche is the
pp. 101-03, for further details relating to the work. figure in the background, on the right, next to the
37. WCC, p. ror. flamboyant Comte de Mornay who leans on the
38. See LAR, pp. 442-3. mantelpiece.
39. See Ziff, p. 209. As Stephen Duffy has suggested, the 57. Ziff lists only one self-portrait in his exhaustive
scarf compares closely with the one worn by the Virgin in checklist of works attributed to Delaroche; this is mentioned
Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia. ina source published in 1856 and described simply as being
40. Quoted in WCC, pp. 101-02. from 1845, location unknown (Ziff, p. 294). As no medium is
41. See LAR, plate 110 and p. 331. mentioned, this could well be the sympathetic graphite self-
42. Ziff, p. 208. portrait in the collection of theMusée Hebert, listed as
43. For the traditional iconographic interpretation, see ‘c.1844 and thus belonging to the period of Delaroche’s
Lexicon der Christlicher Ikonographie, ed. Engelbert second stay in Rome, like the fine drawing of Hebert himself
Kirschbaum S.J. (Rome, 1968), vol.I, p. 590. (both are reproduced in Le Petit Journal, 143).
44. See WCC, p. 103. 58. See Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens (New
45. See Departement des Arts Graphiques, Louvre RF Haven and London, 1995).
35 086, 35 087, 35 089, 35 092 in particular. This sequence of 59. See Ziff, pp. 293-4.
drawings suggests a possible evolution from a figure of 60. Gazette des Beaux-Arts, | (January—March 1859),
Venus (both RF 35 o89 and RF 35 092 include a cherub in p- 192.
addition to the central figure). The lyre is not present in the 61. The original portrait hangs at the Chateau de
otherwise highly developed study of RF 35 086. Although it Versailles: Napoleon ler en grand costume de sacre (1805).
is hard to be precise about the order of the drawings, they 62. Illustrated in Ziff, p. 385.
suggest, at the very least, a fluidity of conception that may 63. Memorial de Sainte-Helene par le Cte de Las Cases,
well have been arrested only when Delaroche decided to use suivt de Napoleon dans lexil . . . lustre par Charlet (Paris,
the work as a poignant memorial to his deceased wife. The 1842).
mourning band on the lyre has not been discussed, and the 64. Bertrand had shared the Emperor’s exile at Saint
most recent catalogue entry still revolves around the Helena, after a distinguished military career, which
‘Sappho’ hypothesis (LAR, p. 374). culminated in his appointment as Grand Marshal of the
46. Acquisitions et restaurations recentes, \tem 221. Palace in 1813. He took a leading role in arranging the return
47. See LAR, p. 374. of Napoleon’s ashes.
48. Quoted in Ziff, p. 145. 65. See Godde, plate 46.

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66. See Werner Hofmann, 4/t in the Nineteenth Century (Eglise Saint Paul-Saint-Louis, Paris). Delacroix’s group of
(London, 1961), p. 250. three grieving angels, much remarked on by contemporary
67. See Edward Morris, ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’, critics, detracts considerably from the presentation of Christ
Annual Reports and Bulletin, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, as an isolated human being (see De David a Delacroix,
I-IV (1971-4), p. 65. PP- 3 78-9).
68. Ziff, p. 227. 85. ‘Pauvre France. . . ! Oserons-nous maintenant
Morris, ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’, fig. 42. vanter notre civilisation depuis la St Barthélemy. Dieu a
Quoted in Godde, plate 53. voulu nous punir dans ce que nous avons de plus cher, notre
Ziff, p. 395. orgueil insatiable — Humilions-nous!’ Bibliotheque de
Quoted in Godde, plate 61. Institut, MS 2156, f.147, letter to Henri Delaborde, dated
See Charlet’s illustrations, in Mémoria/, vol.Il, p. 445. 1848.
OS Ziff, p. 302.
FWNH 86. See Ziff, p. 294, for the listing of Christ in Gethsemane,
SO
SS. Maurice Denis, Theories 1S8go—rg10: Du Symbolisme
wn
SS)
JS the panel painting (only 29 x 22 cm) illustrated here. Ziff
et ie Ca uguin vers un nouvel ordre classique (Paris, 1920), p. 5 further lists three closely related works: Christ in the Garden
76. Mare Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation: Ernest of Olives, the first (20 * 14 cm) from 1852, and Christ on the
Meissonier and French Salon Painting (Princeton, 1996), Mount ofOlives, the second (173 x 123 cm) from 1855; the
p- 231, note 53. third, placed immediately after the second in the checklist
77. ‘Cest merveille que vous puissiez ainsi utiliser votre but much smaller (15 x 11 cm), being undated.
isolement, mais je benirai Dieu cependant le jour ot vous 87. Gautier, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, V (1860), p. 296.
serez rentre dans votre atelier et ou vous pouvez vous livrer a 88. Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (Paris, 1966), p. 84.
vos travaux neufs.’ Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement 8g. ‘Ce serait la plus triste et la plus sainte de toutes mes
des Manuscrits, NAF 16800, f.34; letter from Henri compositions.’ Letter of January 1854, quoted in Ulbach,
Decaisne, dated 12 February 1849. ‘Paul Delaroche’, Revue de Paris, XXXVI (April 1857),
78. Ibid., ff.go—91: letter from Ernest Hebert, dated 11 p. 368. Although the recipient of these letters published by
March 1850. Ulbach is not mentioned, the tone of intimacy — coupled
79. Delaroche’s Girondins (c.1855) was one of the most with a desire to explain his work, which would have been
highly esteemed ofhis late works: Mirecourt records that inappropriate in writing to an artist friend or a member of
despite its small size (58 x 99 cm), it was sold for the his own family — suggests the possibility that Countess
exceptionally high price of 50,000 francs (Mirecourt, p. 44). Potocka may have been the person. Delaroche’s villa at Nice
Gautier called it ‘an excellent thing. Within the proportions adjoined the property where the Countess Potocka and her
of agenre canvas, the artist has managed to achieve a true sister, the Princesse de Beauvau—both painted by Delaroche
history painting: without over-emphasis, rhetoric or false — lived for a proportion ofthe year.
poetry’ (‘une chose excellente. Dans les proportions d’une go. /bid.: ‘un sujet bien simple et bien neuf que je me suis
toile de genre, l’artiste a su faire un vrai tableau @histoire: avise de creer pendant ma fievre et d’esquisser hier au
sans emphase, sans rhetorique, sans fausse poesie’). Gautier, fusain, sur une petite feuille de papier bleu’.
p. 79. Girardet’s engraving, reproducing the work at its Tbid.: ‘une petite Romaine, mayant pas voulu sacrifier
actual size, was also highly praised: see the mention in aux faux dieux, est condamnée a mort et precipitee dans le
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, | (January—March 18509), p. 189. Tibre, les mains li€es; voici ma mise en scene: le soleil est
80. See ibid.: the complimentary remarks about the couche derriere les rives sombres et nues du fleuve; deux
engraving (probably by the editor, Charles Blanc) do not chretiens qui cheminent silencieusement apercoivent le
neglect the point that Delaroche has reproduced the ‘poetic cadavre de la jeune martyre qui passe devant eux, emportee
error’ of Lamartine, in assuming that the Girondins held a par les eaux’.
‘banquet funebre’ on the eve oftheir execution. Delaroche 92. [bid.: ‘Vaurais, comme toujours, meme cache cette
was clearly relying on Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins esquisse, si E.L. ne m/avait dit qu’elle etait destinee a
(1847) in this case, as he had done for his painting of Marie- produire de leffet, ‘Je ne desespere pas, cependant, que
Antoinette (1851). vous ne trouviez, lorsque vous verrez mon griffonage au
81. See Ziff, p. 260. fusain, que le peintre a éte moins mediocre que l’ecrivain,
82. ‘Lorsqu’il n’etait pas encore que le peintre des Enfants 93: . cette tete pale, éclairee de son aureole, a un reflet
d’Edouard et de Cromivell, il ne pressentait pas sans doute de grace corrégienne’. Gautier, p. 144.
qu’un jour viendrait ou son ame s’ouvrirait a des inspirations 94. Millais’s work was indeed shown at the Universal
dun autre ordre; que sa main si studieuse, au debut, de la Exhibition of 1855, and this factor led critics to make the
verité palpable, tracerait avec amour l'image de verités plus comparison: the correspondence already quoted, however,
hautes; qu’enfin la Jeune Martyre et les quatre sujets de indicates a quite different genesis for Delaroche’s painting.
Histoire de la Vierge viendraient admirablement dementir See Ziff, p. 253.
les principes qui le guidaient alors. Delaborde, pp. aH Y 8.
755—
See Maurice Denis, exhibition catalogue, National
Sor ee p72: Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (published Ghent,
84. See Alfred de Vigny, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1986), 1994), Pp: 124-9.
vol.I, pp. 149-53, and 1102-03. This reference is closer in 96. See pp. 277, note 23.
time and in spirit to Delaroche’s work than the main 97. The full report in manuscript was discovered and
pictorial precedent, Delacroix’s youthful painting Christ on published by G. Cromer, ‘Une Piece historique: Poriginal de
the Mount of Olives, which was shown at the Salon of 1827 la note du peintre Paul Delaroche a Arago au sujet du

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 PAW 1s, Di ACh OVG Ee

Daguerreotype’, Bulletin de la Société Frangaise de 107. Ibid., p. 370: ‘Si vous saviez. . . comme je travaille.
Photographie et de Cinématographie, third series, X VII (1930), Depuis hier je suis moins mécontent; j’ai enfin trouve une
pp. 114-18. Madeleine plus sortable. Cette scene de terreur, dont
98. Ibid.: ‘Le procedé de M. Daguerre prouve par ses Pexpression devrait étre si neuve, il se peut qu’elle soit au-
resultats qu’il satisfait completement a toutes les exigences dessus de mes forces. J’irai jusqu’au bout, mais je crains bien
de l’Art et il porte si loin la perfection de certaines de ses dechouer. Si c’etait un sujet dicté par les Evangiles, je
conditions essentielles qu’il deviendra pour les peintres craindrais moins, mais la tout est invention, et quand je
meme les plus habiles, un sujet @’observation et d’etudes.’ pense a ce quia du se passer dans cette chambre au moment
99. Tbid.: ‘La couleur y est traduite avec tant de verite ou le bruit du cortége de notre seigneur s’est fait entendre, la
qu’on oublie son absence.’ tete me tourne et je suis pret a crever ma toile,
100. See Ziff, p. 296. 108. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer
tor. Michael Baxandall, Shadoms and Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1990), p. 46.
(New Haven and London, 1995), p. 33. 1og. Stephen Duffy has pointed out to me the use of the
102. See Victor Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the interaction between interior and exterior spaces in such
Golden Age of Spanish Art (London, 1995), plate 13, pp. 63—6. paintings as Holman Hunt’s 4 Converted British Family
103. Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Index of the Absent Sheltering a Christian Missionary (Oxford, Ashmolean
Wound (Monograph on a Stain)’, October: The First Decade, Museum) and Ford Madox Brown’s King Lear (London,
1976-86, ed. Annette Michelson and others (Cambridge, Tate Gallery).
MA, and London), p. 41. 110. See p. 22. Itis worth observing that Mirecourt refers
104. ‘Hors de ma peinture je suis sans ardeur, sans to the Return from Golgotha by a different title:
courage et sans trop d’esperance.’ Bibliotheque de l'Institut, Vierge devant laquelle on apporte les instruments de la Passion
MS 2156, f.153, letter to Henri Delaborde, dated 2 June (‘Virgin before whom they carry the instruments of the
(1853). Passion’). This suggests, at the least, a reading of the work in
105. See Ziff, p. 261. the light of the traditional appurtenances ofthe Preta, and
106. Ulbach, p. 371: ‘ce serait un ensemble, une espece de perhaps a challenge to locate them. See Mirecourt,
poésie a la Vierge en quatre chants’. p. 51.

[294|
 Last ofIllustrations
CESIIO

All measurements are in centimetres 14 Joas saved by Fosabeth, 1821, oil on canvas, 355 X 259.
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Troyes. Photo: Musees de
The following illustrations are reproduced from ‘Troyes/ Jean-Marie Protte
photographs by Robert Jefferson Bingham (first published 15 Portrait ofSaint Vincent de Paul Preaching, 1823, oil on
in 1858): nos. 4, 15, 17, 18, 20, 41, 86, 111, 142, 144, 147, 148, canvas, 168 x 109. Location unknown. Photo: British
149, 150, 155, 158, 159 and 166. Library, London
16 Antoine Beranger, Study No. 5 after Paul Delaroche,
1 Pierre-Jean David, called David @’Angers, Portrait taken from the Painting of the Death of President Durant,
medallion of Paul Delaroche, 1832, bronze, 14 cm 1827, lithograph, c. 1846. Private collection.
diameter. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers. 17 Mr Horace Delaroche (at the Age of Frve), 1841, oil on
tv Eugene-Ferdinand Buttura, Portrait ofPaul Delaroche, canvas, 100 x 97. Photo: British Library, London
1849, engraving by Jules-Gabriel Levasseur, 1853. 18 Rescue of the Young Caumont de La Force, c. 1825, oil on
Anonymous cartoon initialled ‘McC’, Louis Napoleon canvas, 128 x 97. Formerly in the Museum of
viewing the Body of Liberty. December 4th, 1851. (A Konigsberg (Kaliningrad). Photo: British Library,
Travesty of De La Roche's Celebrated Picture.) Photo: London
Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris (Departement 19 Detail from illus. 133.
des Estampes) 20 Miss Macdonald, 1826, oil on canvas, 55 x 45. Location
Moses on the Nile, engraving by Louis-Pierre unknown. Photo: British Library, London
Henriquel-Dupont, c. 1859 (after a now-lost painting). 21-28 Series of eight scenes illustrating an episode from
British Museum, London (Department of Prints and Rousseau’s Confessions, 1825, watercolour. British
Drawings). Museum, London, Department of Prints and
Jules Delaroche, Male Nude Study, 1818, oil on canyas. Drawings.
wn

Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. 29 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Paolo and Francesca,
Photo: Service Photographique de l'Ecole. 1819, oil on canvas, 48 x 39. Musee des Beaux-Arts,
6 Antoine-Jean Gros, Embarkation of the Duchesse Angers.
d’Angouleme at Pauillac, 1818, oil on canvas, 326 x 520. 30 Filippo Lippi, engraving
by S.W. Reynolds, c. 1828.
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris (Departement
Antoine-Jean Gros, Hercules and Diomedes, 1835, oil on des Estampes).
~I

canvas, 420 x 324. Musee des Augustins, Toulouse. 31 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Death of Cardinal Beaufort, detail
Photo: Giraudon from engraving by Caroline Watson, 1792. Private
Louis-Leopold Boilly, The Students of Baron Gros in collection.
1820, 1820, black and white chalks, 59.5 x 29.1. Musee 32 Pierre Revoil, Joan of Arc in Prison, 1819, oil on canvas,
Carnavalet, Paris. Photo: © Phototheque des Musees 138 x 174.5. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.
de la Ville de Paris 33 Remi-Henri-Joseph Delvaux, Joan of Arc, frontispiece
to Voltaire, La Pucelle (1816 Paris edition). Private
9 Prieta, c. 1820, oil on canvas, 297 x 147. Musee Conde,
Chantilly. Photo: Giraudon collection
10 Portrait ofCarle Vernet, etching by Louis-Pierre 34, 35 Jean-Michel Moreau (ca//ed Moreau le jeune),
Henriquel-Dupont, 1837. British Museum, London, illustrations to Voltaire, La Pucelle (1816 Paris edition),

Department of Prints and Drawings. engraved by Jean-Baptiste Simonet. Private collection

11 Portrait of Horace Vernet, engraving by Claude- 36 Anonymous Flemish painter, Annunciation, 16th
Ferdinand Gaillard, 1836. century, oil on panel. Musee des Beaux-Arts,
Signor Tambourossini or the New Melody, 1821, Bordeaux.
lithograph. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris 37 Joan of Arc Taken Prisoner, engraving by James
(Departement des Estampes). Thompson for Prosper de Barante, Histoire des Ducs de
Bourgogne (1837 Paris edition). Private collection.
13 Portrait ofJean-Fréderic Schall at Seventy, 1822,
drawing. Location unknown. 38 Illustration to Walter Scott, The Abbot, lithograph by

[295 |
 PAW DELARO CHE

Eugene Lami, in Amédée Pichot, Vues pittoresques de 57 Study for the Execution of Lady Jane Grey (central
/’Ecosse, Paris, 1826. Photo: British Library, London. figures), before 1834, drawing. British Museum,
36 co Robert Smirke, Queen Elizabeth Appointing her London (Department of Prints and Drawings).
Successor, engraving by James Neagle, 1796. British onco John Opie, The Execution of the Queen of Scots,

Museum, London (Department of Prints and engraving by William Skelton, 1795. British Museum,
Drawings). London (Department of Prints and Drawings).
40 Semiotic diagram (drawn by Philip Steadman). 59 Mary Queen ofScots dismissing Melville, lithograph by
4 Children of Edward IV Praying in the Tower, 1852, oil on Eugene Lami, in Amedee Pichot, Vues pittoresques de
canvas, 191 x 161. Location unknown. British Library, /’Ecosse, Paris, 1826. Photo: British Library, London.
London. 60 Execution of Lady Fane Grey, photographic
42 Princes in the Tower, 1831, unique lithograph. Photo: reproduction signed ‘Grout’, from a textbook of
Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris (Departement English history, c. 1900. Private collection.
des Estampes). 61 Study of aWoman (possibly Mlle Anais), ¢c. 1830,
43 James Northcote, Scene from Shakespeare’s Richard III, drawing. Musée Magnin, Dijon.
1790, engraving by Francis Legat. Private collection. 62 Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Returning to Brutus
44 The Children of Edward (Princes in the Tower), the Bodies of his Sons, 1789, oil on canvas, 232 x 422.
photograph by Gustav Schauer, 1861. Photo: British Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence
Library, London Photographique de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux
45 Pierre Revoil, Henri [V Playing with his Children, 1817, Peter Paul Rubens, The Martyrdom ofSaint George,
oil on canvas, 51 x 58. Musee National du Chateau de 1615, oil on panel, 195 x 159. Musee des Beaux-Arts,
Pau. Photo: Agence Photographique de la Reunion des Bordeaux.
Musées Nationaux/R. G. Ojeda 4 Head of a Camoldoline Monk, 1834, oil on panel, 23 x 10.
46cS After Roger van der Weyden, Annunciation, c. 1829, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. Photo: H. Maertens/
pencil drawing. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Departement Ville de Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts
des Arts Graphiques. Photo: Agence Photographique Filippo Lippi Falling in Love with his Model, 1822, oil on
de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux canvas, 65.2 x 50.5. Musee Magnin, Dijon. Photo:
47 Roger van der Weyden, Annunciation, oil on panel, 86 x Agence Photographique de la Reunion des Musées
93. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence Nationaux/J.P. Lagiewsky
Photographique de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux 66 Joan ofArc in Prison, 1824, oil on canvas, 377 X 217.
48 Ferdinand-Theodor Hildebrandt, Murder ofthe Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. Photo: Agence
Children ofEdward, 1835, engraving by Karl Girardet, Photographique de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux
reproduced in Le Magasin Pittoresque (1842). Private 67 Joan ofArc in Prison, 1824, oil on canvas, 21 X 17.6.
collection. Wallace Collection, London. Photo courtesy ofthe
ao The Murder ofthe Princes in the Tower, engraving by F. Trustees of the Wallace Collection
Pearson in Cassell’s Illustrated History ofEngland, 68 Death of Elizabeth, 1828, oil on canvas, 422 x 343.
London, 1865-74). Templeman Library, University of Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence
Kent. Photographique de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux/
50 Study for Cromwell, c. 1830, drawing. Victoria & Albert Gerard Blot
Museum, London. Photo: © The Board of Trustees of 69 Cromivell and Charles I, 1831, oil on canvas, 230 x 300.
the Victoria & Albert Museum Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nimes.
Takers of the Bastille before the Hotel de Ville, 1839, oil on 7oO Princes in the Tower, 1830, oil on canvas, 181 x 215.
canvas, 450 x 500. Musee de la Ville de Paris, Petit Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence
Palais. Photo: Giraudon Photographique de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux/
Crommell and Charles I, engraving by Louis-Pierre H. Lewandowski
Henriquel-Dupont, 1833. British Museum, London 7 = Cardinal Richelieu, 1829, oil on canvas, 56.4 X 97.5.
(Department of Prints and Drawings). Wallace Collection, London. Photo courtesy of the
53 Crommell and Charles I (vignette of figures), etching by Trustees of the Wallace Collection
Louis-Pierre Henriquel-Dupont, c. 1833. Private 72 The Assassination of the Duc de Guise, 1834, oil on canvas,

collection. 56 x 98. Musee Conde, Chantilly. Photo: Giraudon

54 Eugene Delacroix, Crommell before the Coffin of 73 Cardinal Mazarin Dying, 1830, oil on canvas, 57.2 X
Charles I, 1831, watercolour. Location unknown. 97.3. Wallace Collection, London. Photo courtesy of
Photo: C.N.M.HLS. the Trustees of the Wallace Collection
Sheet of studies for the Execution of Lady Jane Grey Strafford, 1836, oil on canvas, 265 x 314. Private
(with variants for figure of executioner), before 1834, collection. Photo: Norman Mays
drawing. Musee du Louvre, Paris, Departement des Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1834, oil on canvas, 246 x
Arts Graphiques. Photo: Agence Photographique de la 297. National Gallery, London.
Reunion des Musées Nationaux Study for the Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1832,
Sheet of studies for the Execution of Lady Jane Grey, watercolour and bodycolour, 18.4 x 21.9. The
before 1834, drawing. Musee du Louvre, Paris, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester.
Departement des Arts Graphiques. Photo: Agence 77 Charles de Rémusat, 1845, oil on canvas, 92 x 74. Musée
Photographique de la Reunion des Museées Nationaux du Vieux Toulouse. Photo: P.V. Jean-Luc Auriol

[296|
 LEELUST RATIONS

78 Peter the Great of Russia, 1838, oil on canvas, 130 x 97. 100 Tivo Monks (Dom Romualdo Giani and Dom Tommaso
Hamburger Kunsthalle. Photo: Elke Walford Formiglt), 1834, oil on panel, 23 x 31. Musee des Beaux-
7 oO Study of a man in 16th-century costume (possibly the Arts, Nantes.
actor Firmin), pencil drawing with pastel. Private Ior Tivo Monks (Dom Michele Rigogli and Dom Vicenzo
collection. Frill), 1834, oil on panel, 23 x 31. Musée des Beaux-
80 Study for Strafford, before 1837, pencil and Arts, Nantes.
watercolour. Private collection. Photo: Prudence 102 Head ofa Monk, 1834, oil on panel, 23 x 19. Musée des
Cuming Associates Beaux-Arts, Nantes.
81 Detail from Sirafjord, engraving by Louis-Pierre 103 Firmin as ‘Saint-Mesgrin’inDumas’s Henri ITT et sa cour,
Henriquel-Dupont, 1840. Private collection. 1829, engraving by Maleuvre. Bibliotheque Nationale
82 Detail from SirafJord, engraving by Louis-Pierre de France, Paris.
Henriquel-Dupont, 1840. Private collection. 104 Study for Cardinal Mazarin, c. 1830, watercolour with
83 James Northcote, 7omer of London, engraving by gum varnish. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.
William Skelton, ¢. 1790. Yale Centre for British Art, 105 Interior Scene (Possibly with Cardinal Mazarin), c. 1830,
New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection. Photo: Richard watercolour. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Caspole Photo: © The Board of Trustees of theVictoria &
84 Detail from Strafford, engraving by Louis-Pierre Albert Museum
Henriquel-Dupont, 1840. Private collection. 106 Death ofthe Duc de Guise, 1832, watercolour and body
85 Study for Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers of Cromwell, colour with gum yarnish on paper, 14 x 25. Wallace
before 1836, pencil drawing. Musee du Louvre, Paris, Collection, London. Photo courtesy of the Trustees of
Departement des Arts Graphiques. Photo: Agence the Wallace Collection
Photographique de la Reunion des Museées Nationaux 107 King
86 Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers ofCromivell, 1836, oil on 108 Ambassadors
canvas. Damaged during World War II. Photo: British 109 Murderers and
Library, London 110 Victim; Four Studies for the Assassination ofthe Duc de
Henrietta of France Pursued by ihe Army ofCromwell, Guise, c. 1833, pencil drawing. Victoria & Albert
c. 1838, pencil drawing. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Museum, London, Department of Prints and
Departement des Arts Graphiques. Photo: Agence Drawings. Photo: © The Board of Trustees of
Photographique de la Reunion des Museées Nationaux theVictoria & Albert Museum
88 Study for Herodias, before 1843, pencil drawing. Musee Ill The Shrouding ofChrist, 1853, oil on panel, 24 x 49.

du Louvre, Paris, Departement des Arts Graphiques. Location unknown. Photo: British Library, London
Photo: Agence Photographique de la Reunion des I i S} Honore Daumier, Rue Transnonain: 15 April 1834, 1834,
Musees Nationaux lithograph. Private collection.
89 Sketch for The Taking of the Trocadero, 31 October 1523, 113 Jean-Leon Gerdme, Duel Afier the Masquerade, 1857, oil
1827, ink drawing with watercolour and body colour. on canvas, 39 x 56.3. Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.
Private collection, Paris. Photo: Patrick Roger-Binet, 114 Jean-Leon Gerome, Death of Marshal Ney, 1868, oil on
Galerie Coligny, Paris canvas, 64 x 103.5. Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield.
go The Duc d’Angouleme at the Taking ofthe Trocadero, 31 The Duke ofBurgundy, 1849, pencil drawing. Musée du
October 1823, 1828, oil on canvas, 310 x 259. Chateau de Louvre, Paris, Departement des Arts Graphiques.
Versailles. Photo: Giraudon Photo: British Library, London
gl Study for Saint Amelia, 1831, drawing with watercolour. 116 Study for The Duke ofBurgundy, c. 1849, pencil
British Museum, London (Department of Prints and drawing. Musee du Louvre, Paris, Departement des
Drawings). Arts Graphiques. Photo: Agence Photographique de la
Saint Amelia (1831), engraving by Paul Mercuri, 1837. Reunion des Musées Nationaux
Private collection. 117 Study for the Hemicycle: Gothic Art, 1841, oil on canvas,
93 Paul Mercuri, Study afier Gentile Bellini, engraving, 53 x 34. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.
1829. Kunstbibliothek Berlin. 118 Study for the Hemicycle: Renaissance Art, 1841, oil on
94 Frontispiece to reproduction of Book of Hours of Anne de canvas, 53 X 34. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.
Bretagne, Paris, c. 1860. Kunstbibliothek Berlin. 119 Drawing by M.A. Marc of the Hemicycle of the Ecole des
5 Marquis de Pastoret, 1829, oil on canvas, 155 X 124.5. Beaux-Arts, published in /T//ustration. Bibliotheque
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, purchased Nationale de France, Paris.
from Susan Cornelia Warren. 120, 121 Study for the Hemicycle, c. 1838, paper mounted on
Frangois Guizot, 1837, oil on canvas, 53 x 45. Ny canvas, 35 X 212. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.
Carlsberg Gyptotek, Copenhagen. Photo: Giraudon 122 Study for the Hemicycle (Antonello da Messina and
97 Frangois Guizot, engraving by Adolphe-Pierre Riffaut. Correggio), c. 1839, pencil drawing. British Museum,
Private collection. London (Department of Prints and Drawings).
Study of a man in peasant clothing, c. 1834, pencil 123 Central section of the Hemicycle of the Ecole des Beaux-
drawing. British Museum, London (Department of Arts. Photo: © P. Jean
Prints and Drawings). 124 Left-hand section of the Hemucycle of the Ecole des
Qc vo) An Apostle, 1835, oil on canvas, 46 x 49. Musee des Beaux-Arts, 1841, oil paint mixed with wax, height 390
Beaux-Arts, Nantes. cm. Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Photo: © P. Jean

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 PAUL DELLA RO GEE

Right-hand section of the Hémicycle of the Ecole des Albert Museum, London. Photo: © The Board of
Beaux-Arts. Photo: © P. Jean Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum
Paul Mercuri, Study afier Venetian Painting, 1829, 146 Louise Delaroche with her son Philippe, November 1845,
coloured engraving. Private collection engraving. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris,
Correggio, Veronese, Antonello da Messina, Murillo, Departement des Estampes.
van Eyck and Titian in a detail of the left-hand edge of Horace Delaroche, 1851, oil on canvas, 69 x 39. Private
the Hemicyele of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Photo: © collection. Photo: British Library, London
P. Jean Philippe Delaroche, 1851, oil on canvas, 59 x 38. Private
128 A Family Scene, 1844-7, oil on canvas (unfinished), 103 x collection. Photo: British Library, London
97. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. Photo: A.G. Ville A Mother's Foy, 1843, oil on canvas, 94 x 94. Musee
de Nantes Musee des Beaux-Arts Pescatore, Luxembourg. Photo: British Library,
Mother and Children, c. 1843, oil on panel, 14.4 x 13.8. London
Wallace Collection, London. Photo courtesy of the Napoleon in his Study, 1838, oil on canvas, 117 x go.
Trustees of the Wallace Collection Private collection. Photo: British Library, London
130 A Child LearningtoRead, 1848, oil on panel, 20.5 x 14.2. Napoleon in his Study, engraving by Samuel Freeman,
Wallace Collection, London. Photo courtesy of the 117 x 90. Private collection.
Trustees of the Wallace Collection Jean Portaels, Portrait of Paul Delaroche, c. 1850, oil on
Childhood of Pico della Mirandola, 1842, oil on canvas, canvas, 118.5 x 93.5. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone
116 x 76. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. Photo: A.G. Kunsten, Antwerp. Photo: A.C.L., Brussels
Ville de Nantes Musee des Beaux-Arts Title page from Eugene de Mirecourt, Delaroche
Herodias, 1843, oil on canvas, 129 x 98. Wallraf- Decamps, 3rd edition, Paris, 1871.
Richartz-Museum, Koln. Photo: Rheinisches Napoleon at Fontainebleau, 1845, oil on canvas, 180.5 x
Bildarchiy, Koln 137.5. Museum der bildenden Kunste, Leipzig.
Virgin and Child, 1844, oil on canvas, 147.7 X 87.5. Napoleon at Saint Helena, c. 1855, wall drawing,
Wallace Collection, London, Photo courtesy of the originally in Delaroche’s Paris studio, since destroyed.
Trustees of the Wallace Collection Photo: British Library, London
Girl in a Basin, 1845, oil on canvas (unfinished), 154 x 156 View ofthe Island of Saint Helena, from an early
192. Musce des Beaux-Arts, Besancon. Photo: Cliche edition of the Comte de Las Cases, Memorial de
Ch. Coffet, Besancon Sainte-Helene.
135 Paul Delaroche, 1838, charcoal drawing with estompe 157 Napoleon at Saint Helena, c. 1855, wash drawing with
and sanguine, 26.7 x 21.9. Galerie Jacques Fischer - ink. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Departement des Arts
Chantal Kiener, Paris. Graphiques. Photo: Agence Photographique de la
136 Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1850, oil on canvas, 279.4 x Reunion des Musees Nationaux
214.5. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Photo: Board of 158 Christ in the Garden ofGethsemane, 1846, oil on panel,
‘Trustees of the National Museums and Galleries on 29 x 22. Location unknown. Photo: British Library,
Merseyside (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) London
137 Young Christian Martyr, 1855, oil on canyas, 170 x 148. 159) Christ on the Mount ofOlives, 1855, oil on canvas, 173 X
Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence 123. Location unknown. Photo: British Library,
Photographique de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux/ London
H. Lewandowski 160 Study for Young Christian Martyr, c. 1855, pencil
Saint Veronica, c. 1856, oil on panel, 28 x 49, Musée du drawing. Musee du Louvre, Paris, Departement des
Louvre, Paris, Departement des Arts Graphiques. Arts Graphiques. Photo: Agence Photographique de la
Photo: Agence Photographique de la Reunion des Reunion des Musees Nationaux
Musees Nationaux/H. Lewandowski 161 Study for Young Christian Martyr (Onlookers), c. 1855,
139 Fainting of the Virgin, 1856, oil on canvas (unfinished), pencil drawing. Musee du Louvre, Paris, Departement
27 x 53. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence des Arts Graphiques. Photo: Agence Photographique
Photographique de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux/ de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux
H. Lewandowski 162 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Joan of Arc at the
140 Return from Golgotha, 1856, oil on canvas, 26 x 51. Coronation of King Charles VII in Rheims, 1851,
Musee Departemental de l’Oise, Beauvais. Photo: © 240 x 178. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence
Photos-Contact, Beauvais Photographique de la Reunion des Musces Nationaux
Study for the Hemicycle: Leonardo da Vinci, 1841, oil on 163 Study for Saint Veronica, 1847, ink drawing. Musee du
canvas, 19 x 16. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. Louvre, Paris, Departement des Arts Graphiques.
Louis Roux, The Studio of Delaroche, c. 1855, oil on Photo: Agence Photographique de la Reunion des
canvas. Location unknown. Photo: British Library, Musees Nationaux
London 1604 Study for Saint Veronica, c. 1856, pencil drawing. Musée
143 Girl on a Swing, 1845, oil on panel, 69 x 52. Musee des du Louvre, Paris, Department des Arts Graphiques.
Beaux-Arts, Nantes. Photo: Agence Photographique de la Reunion des
144 Angel's Head, 1835, oil on canvas, 62 x 50. Location Musees Nationaux
unknown. Photo: British Library, London 165 Study for Good Friday, with Self-portrait, 1853, ink
145 Saint Cecilia, 1836, oil on canyas, 202 x 162. Victoria & drawing. Musee du Louvre, Paris, Departement des

[298|
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Arts Graphiques. Photo: Agence Photographique de la 168 Interior, 1853, oil on cardboard, 25 x 33. Musee du
Reunion des Musées Nationaux Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence Photographique de la
166 Good Friday, 1856, oil on canyas, 26 x 51. Private Reunion des Musees Nationaux
Collection. Photo: British Library, London 169 Jean-Léeon Gérome, Jerusalem (Golgotha:
167 Detail of left-hand section of Good Friday from an Consummatum Est), 1867, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 98.
engraving by Edouard-Henri Girardet. Private Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Agence Photographique
collection. de la Reunion des Musces Nationaux

[299|
 Index

CREDO

Page numbers in /falics indicate an illustration.

Academie des Beaux-Arts 14, 21, 117—8, 276n7, 29255 Clark, TJ. 68—9
Academy, French at Rome 14, 16, 230 Coupin de la Couperie, Marie-Philippe 76
Alpers, Svetlana 181, 251 Cousin, Victor 78
Anais, Mademoiselle 122, 182, 286n157, 289n59 Couture, Thomas 26, 286n128
Angouleme, Louis-Antoine, Duc d’ 161—4, 168 Crary, Jonathan 28, 198, 271-2
Angouléme, Marie-Therese, Duchesse d’ 37-8, 124, 164 Cromwell, Oliver 108-15
annunciation (as pictorial structure) 91-3 Crow, Thomas 287n167
Arago, Francois 17, 264
Arrowsmith, John 85, 88 Daguerre, Louis 225, 264-5, 267
Damisch, Hubert 181
Balzac, Honore de 124, 161, 239-40 Daumier, Honore 795, 280n89
Barante, Prosper de 79, 81, 86-8, 103, 200 David, Jacques-Louis 20, 37, 52, 78, 124—6, 168, 279n30
Barthes, Roland 102, 277n30 — Brutus 125
Baudelaire, Charles 7o—1, 73-4, 109-10 David, Pierre-Jean, called David @’Angers 249
Beaufort, Henry, Cardinal 79-80, 97 — Medalhon of Paul Delaroche 13
Bellini, Gentile 766, 167, 181 Decaisne, Henri 258—9
Benjamin, Walter 20 Delaborde, Henri 19, 34, 72, 88, 91, 102, 111, 184, 202, 228,
Berry, Charles-Ferdinand, Duc de 52, 168, 170 230, 258, 281n85
Berry, Marie-Caroline, Duchesse de 52, 55 Delacroix, Eugene 16, 59, 76, 88, 109, 116, 157, 174, 178-9,
Bertin, Edouard 40, 181, 243 289n83
Bingham, RobertJ. 17, 53, 62, 225, 290n106 — Crommell before the Coffin ofCharles I 113
Blanc, Charles 156—7, 173, 200-1, 288n4, 293n80 Delaroche, Gregoire-Hippolyte (father of P.D.) 33—5
Boilly, Louis-Leopold 41, 42 Delaroche, Horace (elder son of P.D.) 71, 56, 230, 235-6,
Bonington, Richard P. 41, 76, 88, 112 280n74
Bonnard, Camille 166 Delaroche, Jules (elder brother of P.D.) 34—5, 37, 36, 117-8
Bordeaux, Henri, Duc de 52—3 Delaroche, Marie-Catherine (née Begat, mother of P.D.) 33
Bosio, Frangois-Joseph 58 Delaroche, Paul (Hippolyte)
Bowyer, Robert 89, 96, 119, 284n61 academic training 40-4
Boydell brothers, 96 and early cinema 29ong6
Brillant, Richard 160~—1, 173—4, 182 and lithography 20, 46-8
Bryson, Norman 56, 126, 128 and Modernism 21, 256-7
Buchez, Paul, 72 and photography 17, 264-72
and portraiture 161—78
Calamatta, Luigi 172 and reform of the Salon jury 117-8
Camaldoli, Monastery and Hermitage of 13, 174-8, 275n1 and religious painting 73, 258—73
Campin, Robert 100 and reproductive engraving 20, 2gon105: see also
Carrel, Armand 116 Calamatta, Francois, Freeman, Henriquel-Dupont,
Carrel, Arnold 116 Mercuri
Carrier, David 73-4, 110 and the theatre 180~4
Cassell, John 104 collectors of, see Arrowsmith, Demidoff, Egerton, Feltre,
Chaudonneret, Marie-Claude 276n4, 284n73 Ferreol de Bonnemaison, Hertford, Padoue, Schletter,
Chenavard, F-M-]J. 71 Sutherland
Chopin, Fryderyk 280n74, 282n6 studios in Paris 229, 229—30, 278n53

| 301]
 PAUL DE DAR OGEE

studio and villa in Nice 21, 228, 271, 293n89 Forbin, Comte Auguste de, 164
success as Salon painter 152 Foucault, Michel 226
working methods 72—3, 286n96 Francastel, Pierre 155
WORKS Francois, Jules 288n22
Charles I 151-4, 153 Fried, Michael 49, 52, 73, 92, 108—g, 111, 181, 195, 284n73,
Childhood of Pico 216, 239-41 285n117
Cromwell 107-15, 109, 111, 113, 134
Duc d'Angouléme 159, 163 Gautier, Theophile 15-16, 22, 25, 28, 33, 70, 152, 154, 184,
Duc de Guise 14, 138, 190-8 260-2, 29on106
Elizabeth go-1, 133, 241, 265 Gericault, Theodore 36, 53
Filippo Lippi 74-7, 775 99, 130, 283n32 — Raft of the Medusa 50, 195
Girlina Basin 219, 244-5 Gerome, Jean-Leéon 116, 228
Hemicycle
des Beaux-Arts 16, 200-8, 205, 209-11, 225-7 — Death ofMarshal Ney 196, 197, 198
Herodias 157, 217, 241-2 — Duel After the Masquerade 196, 197
Joan of Arc 14, 23, 79-88, 131 — Golgotha 273
Lady Jane Grey 14, 20-1, 25, 30, 119-28, 141 Girard, Reneé 36
Marquis de Pastoret 168-70, 169 Giustiniami, Prince 34
Mazarin 139, 187-90 Gleyre, Charles 245
Napoleon at Fontainebleau 20, 200, 252, 268, 277n26 Godde, Jules 94—5, 225, 247, 253-5
Napoleon in his Study 22, 246-9, 247 Gogh, Vincent van 258
Pieta 41-4, 43, 273 Gotlieb, Mare 276n8
Princes in the Tower 25, 94-106, 135 Gould, Cecil 22
Return from Golgotha 22, 224, 272 Goupil, Adolphe 17-18, 76, 228
Richelieu 136-7, 184-7 Granet, Francois-Marius, Choir of the Capuchin Church 50
Rousseau drawings 62-3, 64-7, 68-9 Gros, Baron Antoine-Jean 15, 35, 37-42, 50-1, 100, 125, 154,
Saint Veronica 223, 266-7 229, 257, 289n75
Saint Vincent de Paul 53-5, 54, 99 — Embarkation ofthe Duchesse d’Angouléme 38, 39
Strafford 140, 146-51 — Hercules and Diomedes 39, 40
Virgin and Child 218, 242-4 Guerin, Pierre-Narcisse 24, 51
Young Caumont de La Force 55-6, 57, 58, 99 — Phaedra and Hippolytus 24, 52, 181
Young Christian Martyr 222, 262-5 Guise, Henri, Duc de 191
Delavigne, Casimir 28, 102—3, 106, 180, 284n86 Guizot, Francois 114, 170-3, 200
Delecluze, Etienne 51-2
Delestre, J-B. 40 Halevy, FE. 13, 33, 40-1, 53, 78, 208
Demidoff, Count Anatole 15, 20, 179, 190, 276n13 Halle, Noel 55
Denis, Maurice 256—7, 264, 276n9 Hartman, Sadakichi 198
Deposition (as pictorial structure) g1—3, 194 Haskell, Francis 276n13
Desbordes, Constant 44, 161, 282n20, 288n17 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 20, 277n27
Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline 279n40 Hebert, Ernest 230, 258
Deveria, Eugene 62, 283n52 Heine, Heinrich 30, 79, 106-8, 114, 150, 152, 154, 186—7, 188
~ Birth of Henri1V go Henri IV, King of France 53, 56
Didi-Huberman, Georges 267 Henriquel-Dupont, Louis 17, 2gon105
Doune, William Bodham 106 — engraving of Crommell 18, 111-2
Duban, Félix 202—3, 208 —engraving of Hemicycle des Beaux-Arts 17, 201
Dufourny, Léon 34 Hertford, Marquis of 23, 236, 276n21
Dumas, Alexandre 20, 28, 41, 91, 103, 150, 182, 184, 202, 228, historical genre painting 29, 115, 155
230, 258, 281n85 historical-mindedness 104
Hofmann, Werner 253
Huet, Paul 112, 118
Ecole des Beaux-Arts 14
Hugo, Victor 114
~ Delaroche’s retrospective exhibition at, 16-17
Humboldt, Alexander von 2g1n128
Egerton, Lord Francis (Earl of Ellesmere) 146
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 107
Eitner, Lorenz 284n64
Huve, J-J, 202
Elizabeth I, Queen of England 88—90, 124
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 16, 168, 172, 191, 236, 242
Feltre, Comte Alphonse de 85, 227, 241 — Apotheosis ofHomer 201, 203
Feltre, Duc de 85, 174 — Joan of Arc 84, 264
Ferreol de Bonnemaison, Chevalier 85 — Paolo and Francesca 50, 75, 75-6
Feuerbach, Anselm 243
Firmin (of the Comedie frangatse) 182-3 Jal, Auguste 112
Flaubert, Gustave 102 James, Henry 25—6
Foissy-Aufrere, Marie-Pierre 85 Joly, Adrien-Jacques 33

[ 302|
 IND: BX

Joly, Hugues-Adrien 33 Padoue, Arrighi di Casanova, Duc de 85

juste-milieu, as applied to painting, 115-8 panoramic format 185—208, 225-7
Pastoret, Ameédeée de 160, 168
Kemp, Wolfgang 196-9 Pastoret, Marquis Claude de 168-70
Klein, Melanie 238 Pater, Walter 30
Krautheimer, Richard 181 Pichot, Amédee 58, 281n98
Picot, Frangois-Edouard 117
Lami, Eugene 41, 44, 70, 110, 181, 230, 262, 287n175 Portaels, Jean 249, 250
Langlois, Jean-Charles 225 portraiture, see Delaroche and the portrait
La Rochefoucauld, Vicomte Sosthenes de, 159-60, 164 Potocka, Countess Delphine 243, 293n89
Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude 27 Pourtales-Gorgier, Comte James-Alexandre de 15, 184, 245
Lebrun, Charles 156, 159 Poussin, Nicolas 78, 93, 203, 272
Leighton, Lord Frederic, 201 Preziosi, Donald 226-7
Lemonnier, Henry 201 Pugin, Augustus 97
Lenoir, Alexandre 15, 202
Lenormant, Charles 71
Racine, Jean 50
Leopold I, Grand Duke of Tuscany 13
Ranke, Leopold von 107
Lesueur, Eustache 76—8, 205
Raphael 236
— Annunciation (La Salutation angelique) 76
— Saint Cecilia 48, 236
Levey, Sir Michael 21
— School ofAthens 203, 236
Lichtenstein, Roy 89
Rattier, Joseph 34, 279n52
Lingard, Rev. John 104
Regnault, Jean-Baptiste 44
Louis XVII, King of France 36
Remusat, Charles de 78, 173, 246
Louis-Philippe, King of France 45, 103, 191
Reyoil, Pierre 81, 93
— HenriIV99, 99-100, 188, 192
MeWilliam, Neil 116
— Joan of Arc 82
Madeleine, church ofLa 14, 174, 178
— Tasso and Montaigne, 283n46
Magnin, Andre 52
Reynolds, S.W. 76, 283n22
Magnin, Jeanne 74
Richard, Fleury 94
Manet, Edouard 73—4, 181, 196
Roger, Adolphe 74—5, 282n22
Marie-Ameéelie, Queen of France 41, 117, 168
Robert, Leopold 72
Marrinan, Michael 278n52
— Arrival of the Harvesters 72
Mary, Queen ofScots 121-2, 124
Robert-Fleury, Joseph-Nicholas 152, 228, 272n32, 287ngo
Meissonier, Ernest 26, 37, 256-7
Mendelssohn, Felix; 28-9, 126 Romanticism, ? as concept pUinip
in painting, 83 23,23325
25
Rosen, Charles, 26-7, 115, 178
Mercuri, Paul 17, 165—6, 166, 212
Rosenthal, Leon 26, 115, 179, 278n52
— engraving of Lady Jane Grey 17
Rossini, Gioacchino 46
Merimée, Prosper 243
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 62—8
Messina, Antonello da 206-7
Rousseau, Theodore 118
Meynier, Charles 117
Roux, Louis 229-30, 22¢
Michallon, Achille-Etna 41
Rubens, Sir Peter Paul 127—8
Michelangelo 50
— Martyrdom of Saint George 127
— Moses 50
Ruskin, John 257
Miloyanoyic, Nicolas 187—8, 190
Mirecourt, Eugene de 71, 117, 173, 184, 202, 249-50,
277032, 291n16, 294n110 Saint Bartholemew’s Day, Massacre of 56-8, 259
Modernism 21, 25—6, 31, 73 Salon, Paris, 13-15, 23-4, 90
Moreau, Jean-Michel, ca//ed Moreau /ejeune 81-3, 83 see also Delaroche, success as Salon painter
museums Sand, George 24, 161
— Louvre 34 Sandwich, Louisa, Countess of 246—7
— Luxembourg 53 Schall, Jean-Fredeéric 48—9, 62—3, 161
Schauer, Gustav 100
Napoleon I, Emperor of the French 34, 68, 230, 245-56 Scheffer, Ary 16, 70, 76, 116, 246
Napoleon IL, Emperor of the French 19 Schletter, Heinrich 20, 251
Northcote, James 96, 97, 99-100, 104, 150 Schnetz, Jean-Victor 2g1n1
Schroder, Sir Henry 289n48
Opie, John 119, 124, 126 Scott, Sir Walter 89, 114, 185
Orleans, Due d’, see Louis-Philippe, King of France Shakespeare, William, Richard IIT 96, 180
Orleans, Ferdinand-Philippe, Duc d@ (son of Louis- Silvestre, Theodore 179
Philippe) 117, 191, 205 Sommerard, Alexandre du 97, 288n25
Orleans, Duchesse d’, see Marie-Amelie, Queen of France Stendhal (Henri Beyle) 23—4, 35—6, 91, 180-1
Ovid, 46-8 Sutherland, Duke
of 146

[303|
 PAUL Dub AGRO
G ANE,

Talma, Frangois-Joseph 53, 180-1 Vigny, Alfred de 185, 259

‘Tamburini, Giuseppe 46 — Cling-Mars 185-6
Ter Borch, Gerard 181, 249 Villa Medicis 244
Thierry, Augustin 79 see also Academy, French at Rome
Thiers, Adolphe 15, 102—3, 116, 173, 202, 253, 280n70 Vinci, Leonardo da 226, 240
‘Toews, John 28-9, 126 Visconti, Ennio Quirino 278n8
troubadour painting 75, 93 Voltaire (Frangois-Marie Arouet) 56, 184
see also Revoil, Pierre and Richard, Fleury — Henriade 56
‘Tussaud, Madame 184 —La Pucelle 81-3

Ulbach, Louis 269, 272

Watelet, Louis-Etienne 40
ut pictura poesis 28, 18off.
Weyden, Roger van der, Annunciation ror, 102
Vernet, Carle 45—8, 117 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 108—9
Vernet, Horace 14-16, 23, 44—8, 110, 116-7, 225, 243, 248 Wollheim, Richard 242
Vernet, Louise, see Delaroche, Louise
Veronese, Paolo Martyrdom of Saint George 128 Zerner, Henri 26—7, 115, 178
Victoria, Queen of England 20 Ziegler, Jules-Claude 15, 202, 292n35
Viel-Castel, Comte Horace de 108-9, 114, 189 Ziff, Norman 52, 115, 187, 251, 269, 275n1

|304|
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Stephen Bann is Professor of Modern
Cultural Studies at the University of Kent.
He has written and edited many books
including The Clothing of Clio (1984), The
Inventions of History (1990), Frankenstein,
Creation and Monstrosity (Reaktion, 1994),
and Romanticism and the Rise of History
(1995).

Front: The Execution of Lady Jane Grey,

National Gallery, London

Back: Cardinal Richelieu, courtesy the

Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London

REAKTION BOOKS LTD

11 Rathbone Place
London WIP IDE, UK