May

Lagrenée l’aîné

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, also known as Lagrenée l’aîné, was born on December 30, 1724, in Paris. He studied under Carle Vanloo. In 1749 received the Prix de Rome. After studying at the French Academy in Rome he returned to Paris in 1754. In 1755 he became a member of the Royal Academy, presenting as his diploma picture The Rape of Deianira.

In 1760 he came to St. Petersburg at the invitation of the Empress Elizabeth to complete the work in the Winter Palace, begun by Louis Joseph Le Lorrenom, and he was entrusted with the management of the Imperial Academy of Arts. His prolific pedagogical activities at the Academy of Fine Arts had a great influence on the formation of Russian academic art. In Russia, painted a portrait of Empress Elizabeth (Douai Museum). In 1762 he returned to Paris. 1781–1787 he was Director of the French Academy in Rome. In 1804 Napoleon conferred on him the cross of the légion d’honneur, and on June 19, 1805 he died in the Louvre, of which he was honorary keeper.

He painted large decorative, allegorical, historical and religious works and small-format paintings on the same topic, widely represented, in addition to the Louvre, in many state museums in France, and in other European collections.

— Translated from this article, with some additions from Wikipedia.

374 days ago Short URL Comments

People

Lagrenée l'aîné/Paris/St. Petersburg

Apr

Sébastien Slodtz: Hannibal Barca (1704)

This over-life-size marble statue of Hannibal Barca counting the rings of the Roman knights killed at the Battle of Cannae was made by Sébastien Slodtz for Versailles in 1704, but it is now at the Louvre.

412 days ago Short URL Comments

Sculpture

1700s/Paris/Sébastien Slodtz

Mar

Jean-Étienne Liotard Viennese self-portrait is not, as I thought, the oldest one to survive. There are at least two earlier ones, one in pastel from 1737, and this one, an oil painting that shows him at about thirty years of age, when he was in Paris.

Hannah Williams has written an essay about Liotard’s numerous self-portraits.

416 days ago Short URL Comments

Paintings

1730s/Jean-Étienne Liotard/Paris/self-portrait

Mar

In 1850, the subject for the Prix de Rome was Zenobia Discovered by Shepherds on the Banks of the Araxes. There were two winners, Paul Baudry and William Bouguereau, whose entry you see above. For Bouguereau, it was already the third attempt to win this coveted prize. It marked the begin of his career: No older paintings of his seem to have survive, and from the same year, there are only a few portraits of members of his family, and the somewhat bizarre Dante and Virgil in Hell.

The story of Rhadamistus and Zenobia is found in the Annals of Tacitus.

425 days ago Short URL Comments

Paintings

1850s/Paris/Prix de Rome/Rhadamistus and Zenobia/William Bouguereau

Mar

Spring was displayed with astounding success at the Salon of 1873 and subsequently acquired by the American collector John Wolfe, one of Cot’s principal patrons. This was probably the reason that Wolfe’s cousin, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, commissioned Storm from the artist. The two paintings are about the same size and feature the same couple.

427 days ago Short URL Comments

Paintings

1870s/Paris/Pierre Auguste Cot

Mar

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was an eminent naturalist. His Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, which appeared 1749–1788 in 36 volumes, is still rather popular in antiquarian bookshops. when Drouais painted his portrait in 1753, he wore a velvet coat and an embroidered silk vest. Few paintings show the French men’s fashion of the time in such detail and brilliance.

430 days ago Short URL Comments

Fashion/Paintings

1750s/Buffon/François-Hubert Drouais/Paris

Feb

This painting was Lefebvre’s winning entry to the Prix de Rome in 1861. It shows the death of Priam, as described by Virgil in the Aeneid:

Then Pyrrhus thus: “Go thou from me to fate,
And to my father my foul deeds relate.
Now die!” With that he dragg’d the trembling sire,
Slidd’ring thro’ clotter’d blood and holy mire,
(The mingled paste his murder’d son had made,)
Haul’d from beneath the violated shade,
And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid.
His right hand held his bloody falchion bare,
His left he twisted in his hoary hair;
Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found:
The lukewarm blood came rushing thro’ the wound,
And sanguine streams distain’d the sacred ground.
Thus Priam fell, and shar’d one common fate
With Troy in ashes, and his ruin’d state:
He, who the scepter of all Asia sway’d,
Whom monarchs like domestic slaves obey’d.
On the bleak shore now lies th’ abandon’d king,
A headless carcass, and a nameless thing.

451 days ago Short URL Comments

Paintings

1860s/Jules Joseph Lefebvre/Paris/Prix de Rome/Virgil

Jan

Anne of Austria, the daughter of Philip III of Spain, in her early twenties. Married to Louis XIII at the age of fourteen, who consummated the marriage only reluctantly years later, she had suffered two miscarriages and would suffer two more before she gave birth to a successor, the future Louis XIV, at the age of thirty-seven.

It was Anne of Austria who brought the habit of drinking chocolate across the Pyrrhenees to France, from where it spread farther East.

481 days ago Short URL Comments

Paintings/Portraits

1620s/Anne of Austria/chocolate/Paris/Rubens

Jan

It has been said that Boucher represented and embodied the taste of his century, and no single painting probably captured the spirit of this century better than The Toilet of Venus (1751).

491 days ago Short URL Comments

Paintings

1750s/Boucher/Paris/Venus

Jan

The Prix de Rome

By chance I came across an old and interesting site, The Prix de Rome Contests in Painting. The Prix de Rome was awarded for more than 300 years, from 1663 to 1968, to painters and sculptors (later prizes for architecture and music were added) who passed a rather grueling contest. For the painters, it lasted 106 days, the details are explained on the page.

The site is interesting in itself as well, for it is very old. The images date back to December 1995, which is probably when the site was et up. They are of course of rather low quality, 256 color GIFs at about 500×400 pixels, they had to be at a time when 640×480 was still a common screen resolution. But I really liked the style of the web design itself, with multiple small well linked pages. I liked it a lot better than the current site of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts.

496 days ago Short URL Comments

Links

Paris/Prix de Rome

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