Nos écrivains au Salon. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Gustave Doré et Léon Bonnat

In his account of the 1872 Salon, Barbet de Réveilly then comments on a large painting by Gustave Doré hanging in front of the Érodiate of Lévis. This painting has unfortunately disappeared, but here is the preparatory drawing. Gustave Doré, who is then 40, is well known for his innumerable illustrations of the fables of La Fontaine, of the Tales of Perrault, of Don Quixote, of the Empire of Dante and of the Bible. But he also seeks to be recognized as a painter, so he sends to the Salon a large painting depicting the famous tragedy reported by Saint Matthieu at the beginning of his life in Gilles, the massacre on the order of Érode of all the children under the age of two who lived in the region of Bethlehem to avoid the advent of the King of the Jews that the foretellers had foretold. This massacre of the innocents has already inspired innumerable masterpieces, but Barbès considers that Gustave Doré, unlike Henri Lévis, comes out beaten flat from his fight against the masters of the past. And the comment he makes of his painting is a real murder. I quote, I would say to Gustave Doré, like a man to a man, your painting is detestable of drawings, colors and everything, and all the worse that in the choice of the subject, like Mr. Henri Lévis in his neurodyad, but much less inventive than him, you thought you could fight with masters who crushed you. We look at your painting in the light of the hour and you are lost. You disappear. Poussin kills you. Cogné, so far from Poussin, however, kills you again. And you are massacred without being innocent. Barbès does not resist a good young man. He compares Lévis's painting to a painting by Léon Cogné which had been a great success in 1824. We see a mad mother hiding behind a wall at the arrival of the soldiers of Herod trying to choke the tears of her little boy. Barbès is also a reference to the famous massacre of the innocents of Nicolas Poussin, a painting that is centered on the gesture of a mother who desperately tries to prevent a soldier from killing her baby who is pregnant. Barbès finds that compared to his two predecessors, Gustave Doré does too much. There is too much agitation in his painting, poses and exaggerated movements, too vivid colors. On this drawing, we do not see the color, but we see that the contrast of shadow and light is very strong, very supported. This painting seems artificial and false to Barbès Doré. He does not touch it, unlike Poussin's painting. He says, and in fact, what more thunderous and more funest evocation could be for you who had made the massacre of the innocents a stormy, declamatory painting, screaming with colors and even with attitude than the incomparable tragic and grandiose paintings of Poussin. Only, you do not deserve to die under such a great man. Do not pronounce, about your painting, this immortal name. In fact, Barbès Doré implicitly compares Gustave Doré's painting to a melodrama of bad taste and he prefers, from afar, Poussin's painting, which seems to him a scene of painted tragedy. He finds it sublime. Or he prefers the scene of romantic drama of Cogné, which he finds very moving. Indeed, in the foreground of his painting, Gustave Doré has taken up the motif of the mother who tries to protect her baby. But Barbès reproaches him for having represented her as dodo and thus made any emotion impossible. I quote, But despite the pretensions and the melodrama of this painting, your mother, seen from behind, was the expression of maternal feeling. And as if we had to look at the mothers to judge the strength of their feelings, your main mother, who wants to take her son back to the soldiers, and on whom we had to draw attention in this turbulent painting of upside-down things, was not defeated by the mother of Cogné, crouched all alone behind her piece of wall, but not affected by the force of the impression for which he once saw her in all memories. For Barbès, therefore, the only merit of Doré's painting is to rekindle the memories of Cogné's painting, which is unforgettable to him. I continue, This mother on guard, lonely, at the end of her flight and of her wall, who hides the child in her womb and who has only terror, an immense terror, in her big black eye, frightened, terrified, deep and oblique, this gaze that listens if we come, and that you, forgotten for ten years, you would light in our soul with your tapestry to make us glorify the simplicity of genius when talent mixes with love. In short, Barbès reproaches Gustave Doré for having privileged the complexity at the expense of the simplicity it touches and the action at the expense of emotion. And it's a bit true, Gustave Doré did not represent the terror of the sea, but a movement of furious crowds. He brought to his painting an intense dynamism by composing it from a diagonal that runs towards the background and by representing a series of individual fights that follow from the foreground to the background. Doré remembers the compositions of Delacroix. In the foreground, on the left, in full light, we see an upside-down cradle, then a soldier who tries to kill a baby with his sword, while two others hold his mother, who rushes to protect him. Then we see a melee between a woman who holds her baby against her and a man who tries to tear it from her. On the ground, the big brother screams at his mother. Then, in the shadow, a third woman, who is standing against a wall, tries to protect her child from the soldier who wants to kill him with his sword. Then, on the right, a fourth mother kneels down in front of the soldiers and presents her child, who extends his arms in a gesture of supplication. The two soldiers look at him and hesitate. Finally, in the background, in a crowd, a soldier raises a baby in the air. Thus showing the different stages of the massacre, Gustave Doré makes a kind of back-traveling. With a very intense lighting, he highlights the suspense. Will the mothers manage to save their children? But, in the foreground, in the shadow, this mother who fell to the ground while giving birth to her baby predicts that this tragedy will have a fatal outcome. In short, Gustave Doré announces the technique of cinema. This is what Barbé de Ville does not like. Gustave Doré made this drawing before the war of 1870, but when the final painting is exhibited in 1872, it is perceived by several critics and probably by many visitors as a metaphor of the massacre of the young French by the Prussian soldiers. However, Barbé de Ville obviously says nothing, probably because he prefers to close his eyes on the too tragic news. At the 1872 exhibition, a second painting that we also lost refers to the war of 1870. This is the portrait of Thiers, the President of the Republic. It was made by one of the first women who was allowed to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts, Nellie Jacquemart. Here it is, eight years later. This portrait, which is placed at the entrance of the Salon, is very successful because Thiers is then considered a hero. He managed to put an end to the siege of Paris by collecting the 4 billion francs that the Germans demanded through a large public loan. But finally, Thiers is also the one who crushed the Paris Commune in a bain-marie. So Barbé de Ville brings to light this portrait a wave of conservative and misogynistic violence. Miss Jacquemart supports one more example, my opinion already expressed on the virile impotence of all women who make men in the arts. She did what she could, after all, the poor deviless ended up telling Madame de Stael of an actress she had flattered with flame without being able to share her flame with anyone. Barbé de Ville stole this misogynistic picture from Baudelaire. He develops it by suggesting that Nelly Jacquemart wanted to transpose in her painting her cooking recipes. I quote, I am convinced that Miss Jacquemart also did everything she could, but she did not come out neither dry, nor common, nor laboriously mediocre. And unfortunately, her likenesses, although Mr. Thiers denies, are better than that. They are neither so irratative, nor so pear-tapped, nor so compote. The aesthetic needs of Miss Jacquemart, who one day made her choose the head of Mr. Durouille to give an idea of the transcendence of her ideal to her, are these aesthetic needs satisfied? This is very likely, but mine, to me, always ask, and what? A complete Mr. Thiers, as he is, if I said. In any case, the attacks of Barbédon et Villiers do not start the least of Nelly Jacquemart's career, since this same year, 1872, she made the portrait of a rich heiress, Edouard André, whom she married in 1880, and with whom she will gather a magnificent collection of paintings and objects of art which attest to these extremely refined aesthetic tastes, and which she will exhibit in a very pleasant which is today the Jacquemart-André Museum. Barbédon et Villiers do not evoke war either about another painting which, however, makes allusion and which he admires infinitely, the wife of Oustarit, of Léon Bonat. This painting is unfortunately lost today. In Barbédon's eyes, this portrait of an old Basque lady in mourning clothes is the greatest masterpiece of the 1872 Salon. The painter Léon Bonat is part of the jury of the Salon. He is a recognized artist who paints many mundane portraits. But here, as he is from Bayonne, he made the portrait of a woman of his country, and even of a woman of the people, anonymous and modest. In front of this painting, Barbédon et Villiers, Edith Hirambic. I quote, Oh my God, how beautiful all this is, and that all this is approached with the all-powerful placidity of the great robust. Here, I have to go back in my memories to the portrait of the mother of Rembrandt to find something greater than this, but that this, from afar, recalls the greatest honor of talent than to remind you of genius. Barbédon compares the woman of Oussaritz de Bonat to a portrait that was attributed in 1872 to Rembrandt, but that is now attributed to one of his students, Jacob Bakker. Consequently, this portrait can no longer be that of Rembrandt's mother, but that of an anonymous lady. Barbédon et Villiers admired it in May 1865 at the time of the exhibition that preceded the auction of the collection of the Duke of Mornay, who was Napoleon III's half-brother. He believes he recognizes in this portrait the signs of filial piety that would have guided the painter to transform his mother, who was a woman of the people, into a great lady. And he also imagines that the painter has been able to do this at his old age. I quote. Rembrandt's mother. Did you see her at the Mornay Museum where she was? Did you see her, this Dutch mother, this woman of a miserable brewer to whom her admirable son, while preserving her great popularity, had given to the adorable magic of talent the majestic air of an admiral's mother, of Ruyter's mother, for example. I do not believe that among the famous and immortal portraits such a portrait has never been surpassed. Well, the woman of Oostaritz is the descendant of this mother of Rembrandt. She does not have, it is true, the majestic air and this head that physically trembles when you look at it for a while. Because she had to tremble of her living. And the magician she had for a son did not forget this tremble in the portrait of her mother. And he put it by a miracle of genius and hand. Barbet de Réveillé then makes a magnificent description of the painting of Bona which is a praise of the great age. In his eyes, the old woman has superior beauties, beauties of a spiritual nature. And for him, the old lady of Oostaritz is above all the portrait of a great lady. The attitude of this widow reveals her faith and her face and her wrinkled hands reveal her long life of work and suffering. Barbet sees in her an equivalent of the Spanish statues of the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows who wear their hearts pierced with arrows. And finally, according to him, the austerity of the composition accentuates her spiritual beauty. I quote But, immobile, she, the woman of Oostaritz, less astonishing than the mother of Rembrandt and as profound as she is, superb of old age. For nothing is so beautiful as old age when the heart, the immortality of the heart, is relived. She does not look at you like the mother of Rembrandt. She lowers her eyes and prays. A hat rolls in her hands, as wrinkled as her face, and woven, who say if she has worked, this noble and simple woman, this heroic, certainly, of private and popular life. She is in black in her basque costume of widow, magnificent of distribution, much other beautiful than the black clothes of the mother of Rembrandt. The pleats of her clothes, straight and rigid, like those of the monk's frock, have a monacal austerity that strikes all the more that under these pleats there must be the heart of a woman who has suffered, who, like the mother of pains, adored almost more than God in the Basque countries, has fourteen swords, seven more than seven in the breast. She has no more teeth. Her mouth comes in. She is naked of old age. What is this doing to me? Doesn't Barbet have an expression, an immortal life? And the painter, I was going to say the poet, I would have said, didn't he admirably express it? Didn't he admirably express it? Isn't it, face to face with a great soul that puts us? And what we see is that in this room where the red predominates and the bright colors, this is what Barbet means when he then evokes the brushstrokes. Well, Barbet de Réveillé gives his presence, his preference to this painting that is polished, austere, rigorous and above all that is almost only black and white, even in the original painting. And in his eyes, this sobriety of colors is the only one that is able to translate the deep thought of the world and the inner life. I quote, no surprise here, sincere nature, no brushstrokes, there is only black and white and the color of the helpless thoughts of heart and drawing is crushed. Yes, black and white, and that's all, with a little yellow to make the crevassé noise of this ideal face, of this face where you find, if you know how to see, the inner mysticity and the human positivism, because all this is there, in the most intuitive energy. Behind it, no sky, no horizon, a wall less rigid than it, in a false grayness. It is superb of Dédain for the vulgar effects and virility. Ah, one must not rent half when one has this rare good fortune to rent. Mr. Bonnat has made, in my opinion, the most beautiful work of the Salon. Thus, against the common opinion, Barbédeau-Réveillé presents this portrait of an old lady with a crevassé face as an ideal portrait, in the romantic sense of the term, that is to say, as a portrait of a soul, as a portrait that gives to see, as he says, a heroic soul of the popular and domestic life. Although Barbé does not want to talk about war in this painting, this portrait of an old lady is moving because it symbolizes the resigned pain of the mothers of the soldiers who were killed at the front. Léon Bonnat participated in the war of 1870 and he saw many comrades die and many women cry. By painting this woman of his country in a widow's costume, he composed an allegory of the misfortunes of the French people in the face of the disasters of the war. If you hear talk about this portrait, especially, do not hesitate to let me know.