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| miscellaneous french (1800s) |
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| The link featured on the previous page is a painting by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758-1823) titled The Empress Josephine (1763-1814), 1805. A popular painter during the French Empire, much favoured by Jos�phine and later by Marie-Louise, Prud'hon was fond of shrouding his figures in mist in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci and Correggio. This adds to the melancholic charm of his portraits, set in the open air in the English style. Born in Martinique and widow of the General de Beauharnais, Jos�phine Tascher de la Pagerie married Bonaparte in 1796. When she did not provide the Emperor with an heir she was abandoned in 1809. Prud'hon depicted her in the grounds of her ch�teau at Malmaison in 1805, a year after Napoleon's consecration. |
| The Raft of the Medusa, 1819 |
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| The Turkish Bath, 1862 |
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| Th�odore G�ricault (1791-1824): G�ricault was highly moved by the real-life drama Of 149 shipwrecked sailors from the frigate "Medusa", abandoned for twelve days on a raft off the Senegalese coast. To illustrate it he chose the moment on July 17, 1816 when the 15 survivors were overcome with despair as the "Argus", the ship that eventually was to rescue them, sailed off. This was the first time a contemporary news item had been made the subject for a painting on a large scale. The dark subject, matched by the colouring and the macabre though realistic depiction of the corpses, make what was a controversial exhibit of the 1819 Salon, the first epic example of Romanticism. |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867): Completed when he was 82, this composition was the result of many studies which Ingres made from 1807 onwards of female bathers, a theme linking the female nude with Turkish exoticism. His illustrations of the harem might well have been inspired by the "Letters of Lady Montagu" (1764) which he read forty years earlier. The serpentile contours of the bodies and his repeated use of the same model add a note of abstraction to the sensuality of this accumulation of voluptuous flesh, a pure fantasy of an exotic, perfumed Orient which had entranced Europeans for over a century. |