National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | French Painting

Jean-Louis Demarne’s career was not that of a powerful Academician. He was instead a painter who actively sought out and capitalised on the taste of middle-class collectors. Influenced by the highly finished landscapes and genre scenes of Dutch painters currently in vogue among Parisian collectors, Demarne’s landscapes and genre scenes found an eager audience in France and abroad. A Ferry and Boats on a Canal is an excellent example of Demarne’s picturesque depictions of everyday rural life. It uses the compositional convention of a central vanishing point that became something of a trademark for the painter. The landscape itself is quite generic, it could be Holland, Flanders or Northern France. Demarne is an important example of a commercially-minded artist who generally resisted participation in contemporary politics in favour of the private patronage of the burgeoning middle class.

Eugène Isabey was a deeply Romantic painter. His work during the 1820s and 1830s is characterised by a concern with the unpredictable nature of the elements, the response of the individual to nature, and a refined, vigorous application of paint that emphasised the artist’s hand. Storm with a Shipwreck is one of Isabey’s key Romantic seascapes. He depicts the sea as an abstract force that has the power to annihilate man and his work – our attention is drawn to the corpse of a sailor and part of the wreck of his ship in the lower corner. The violent sea and clouds and the dark, ominous rocky outcrop suggest a place of absolute danger. In this way, Isabey invokes the sublime, which was so closely associated with the sea: the sea as a space of imminent threat and an incomprehensible infinitude. Isabey’s application of paint matches the subject of work; each is as theatricalised and energetic as the other.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was one of Europe’s first celebrity painters. He built a reputation on instructive paintings that covered the edifying themes of the education of children, the virtues of a simple, provincial family life, and the heroism of everyday activities. Epiphany depicts a peasant family participating in the annual celebration of the gateau de roi (a Catholic feast held each year on the 6th of January), where the children search for a bean hidden in the king’s cake, the finder of which will become king for the day. Just as the philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were asking the country’s bourgeoisie to rid themselves of the distractions and trappings of civilisation – to return to nature and a moral, family life – Greuze’s Epiphany makes clear the simple (if completely illusory) pleasures of the honest, peasant family, uncorrupted by the temptations of modern, bourgeois life.

The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote during the eighteenth century of the importance of education. Rousseau argued that all children are born ‘naturally good’, and that education and experience could cultivate and affirm this natural goodness. It was the responsibility of families and society, Rousseau found, to enable this goodness. Noël Hallé’s painting illustrates this principle with the help of an image drawn from Roman history. The widow Cornelia, daughter of a great warrior, receives an ostentatiously dressed visitor. In response to the rich fabrics and the precious jewellery of the visitor, Cornelia, referring to her children, asserts ‘These are my jewels.’ Cornelia is the supreme example of the virtuous mother, who places the emotional, intellectual and moral needs of her children above materialism. Note her simple clothing and hair and her inquisitive, upright children; two of them, Tiberius and Gaius, would go on to become great leaders.

Paul Guigou regularly painted the scenery of Provence in southern France, the region of his birth. This small landscape is typical of his work and captures the crisp light of the region, with its strong jewel-like colours. The painting’s raised point of view gives a sense of the emptiness of Provence. The composition is dominated by the expanse of the land and the sky, while the near perfect reflections on the river as it winds its way under the rustic stone bridge provide another focal point. Guigou came from a wealthy family and developed an early interest in landscape painting. He started his working life as a notary’s clerk but dedicated himself to painting full-time in 1862. In Paris he was friendly with many of the Impressionist group, including Frédéric Bazille, Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet. Even so, Guigou remained true to his own vision and went unnoticed at the Salon until after his death.

In Florence to avoid revolutionary Paris, François-Xavier Fabre circulated in largely English aristocratic circles and generated a prominent reputation as a painter of portraits and landscape souvenirs for tourists. In the face of this commercial activity, he struggled to produce work that accorded with his academic training. The Death of Narcissus provides a compelling response to this conundrum. It recounts the mythological narrative of Narcissus, a handsome youth who, indifferent to the affection of others, is condemned to fall in love with his own image in a forest pool. Narcissus fades away, losing both his senses and his beauty, as he desperately attempts to possess his own image. While the work is suggestive of the Academic genre of history painting, it represents an early historical landscape. Fabre had just read Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s famous Elements of Perspective (1799–1800), which sought to elevate the landscape genre to an Academic status similar to that of history painting. Valenciennes argued for landscape painting that was both highly learned and paid close attention to the study of nature. Fabre’s canvas represents an important example of an historical landscape, painted two years before the Académie in Paris created a special Grand Prix for the genre.

In this important painting, Edgar Degas represents the city in a theatrical way. His nanny and young child sit on a stage, with Paris’ Luxembourg Garden dotted with strollers – those flashes of pink, ochre, black and white – as a backdrop. The painting marks the changing architectural and social conditions of Parisian life, as the city’s network of old streets and alleys was cleared to make room for the wide, sweeping boulevards (for which the city is now famous) and a series of central points of focus. The city became, as the strollers indicate, a space of leisure and spectacle: of looking and of being seen. But as with his images of laundresses, prostitutes and ballet dancers, Degas’s painting also pays attention to the contemporary conditions of women’s labour. The nursing industry underwent a boom in Paris in the 1870s, and was regulated in 1874 with a series of financial and sanitary restrictions. The nanny – already the subject of intense scrutiny within the space of the family – was now squarely under the eye of the state and the public. As a depiction of labour, indeed of the conditions of modern life, this is a highly significant example of the Realism for which Degas is famous.

The central theme of François-André Vincent’s moving painting Belisarius is tolerance. The subject of the work is the illustrious Roman general who, according to legend, was wrongly accused of conspiracy against the emperor Justinian, blinded and forced to lead an itinerant life as a beggar. This was a popular subject at the time among both painters and writers. The painting records the moment when the pitiable Belisarius is recognised by one of his former soldiers. The soldier’s shame at finding himself in the presence of the maligned general is palpable. Through this painting Vincent sought to propagate tolerance and unity, during a period of intense political and social upheaval shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution of 1789.

Eugène Delacroix is one of the most significant painters of the 1800s, and the greatest of the century’s Romantic painters. In early 1832, Delacroix travelled throughout Spain and the French North African colonies of Morocco and Algeria as part of a diplomatic mission. Delacroix described North Africa as a place of sensation and beauty fundamentally unlike Europe – a place, he wrote, ‘made for painters’. This is one of many paintings that resulted from this journey, and among the finest. This stirring scene – a tumultuous line of violent, turbaned Arabs charging towards some hidden enemy – had as its source a fantasia viewed by Delacroix while in Morocco: a choreographed military spectacle that is unique to Morocco, whose origin was, as its name suggests, more in the imagination than actuality. The painter’s fluid and gestural brushwork, the sharp contours and the rich palette, produce an image of the Orient as dazzling and theatrical, a wild place of dust and violence.

Louis Gauffier’s Vallombrosa and the Arno Valley Seen from the Paradisino is a landscape that brings together a series of often competing influences and sources: close attention to the details of nature; Neo-classicism’s mathematical description of space; ‘nature’ as it was described at the time by the poet and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and, in turn, the Romantic ideal of man and nature in harmony. By bringing these disparate sources together, Gauffier produces a theatricalised landscape. The terrace in the foreground acts as a stage, beyond which the landscape is both warm and awesome, a place to wander and find one’s self, as the monk on our left indicates. The landscape unfolds in a series of layers, where men might come to recognise their democratic sensibility and their individualism.