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Gustave Moreau and Ingres by PETER COOKE
nised ever since his first Salon, in 1852, when Théophile Gautier asserted that ‘M. Moreau’s true master is Delacroix’.1 Indeed, until the end of his life Moreau remained haunted by the latter’s sense of expressive colour. The influence of Théodore Chassériau is also well recorded. It was before Chassériau’s fine mural paintings at the Cour des Comptes, in the now demolished Palais d’Orsay, Paris, that he declared to his father his fundamental ambition to ‘create an epic art that is not academic’.2 The remarkable ascendancy that Chassériau held over Moreau for two or three years has been confirmed by the recent discovery of notebooks containing drawings by Moreau executed in a style that cannot easily be distinguished from his mentor’s.3 Although the young artist soon abandoned his infatuated imitation of the latter’s style, he remained faithful to Chassériau’s memory until the end of his life.4 Yet, if Moreau retained his admiration for Chassériau, in his maturity he turned completely against Delacroix, in whose art he then saw a ‘theatrical and falsely, materially overexcited imagination’ and a ‘complete absence of the laws that make the arabesque speak to the eyes’.5 He attacked Delacroix’s drawing and colour as examples of modern decadence, in the nefarious tradition of the Carracci.6 To his ‘insipid rhetoric’, and to the ‘foolishness’ of his system of complementary colours, Moreau opposed ‘the Flemish and our good Italian Primitives’.7 For, after his emulation of Delacroix and Chassériau, Moreau had, in the words of Henri Focillon, been ‘touched by the Pre-Raphaelite grace’.8 His conversion to this archaising spiritualist aesthetic helps to account for the low esteem in which he held most of the artists of his time, who, tainted by materialism, had failed to ‘go back upstream to find the true, the beautiful tradition’.9 Thus, in the naturalistic figure painting of ‘M., G. and C.’ (almost certainly Meissonier, Gérôme and Cabanel), Moreau saw ‘the complete negation of the only qualities worthy of admiration in an artist: imagination,
caprice and feeling’.10 Paul Baudry’s decorations in the Opéra Garnier (completed in 1874) were characterised by Moreau as ‘the last blow dealt to what is called painting of style’ and as ‘a joke presented seriously’,11 while in his friend Eugène Fromentin’s posthumous exhibition, held at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1877, Moreau found ‘a bouillabaisse of Old Masters’ and ‘the triumph of chic’.12 He told his pupil Henri Evenepoel that Manet had ‘a very fine eye’, but ‘a total absence of style’ and ‘detestable matter’,13 while, in a private note, he wrote that Rodin produced hideous ‘gargoyles’, although he recognised in the sculptor ‘a lot of talent, but spoilt by an enormous amount of charlatanism’.14 In Odilon Redon Moreau saw ‘a far from banal brain’, but considered the resulting art ‘sad’.15 These dismissive and sardonic comments by an idealistic painter at odds with the aesthetic trends of his time stand in contrast to Moreau’s more respectful, nuanced and ambivalent attitude towards Ingres. Indeed, Moreau engaged constantly with Ingres’s art, throughout his mature career. Although commentators have emphasised Moreau’s early debt to Delacroix’s expressive colourism, ‘Monsieur’ Ingres was by far the most important French artist for Moreau and his generation. Ingres’s retrospective at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 had decisively established his pre-eminence.16 Henceforth, he was, as Léon Lagrange put it, ‘the mute champion of the principles of Beauty’.17 Jon Whiteley has explored the contrasting significance that Ingres held for the two most prominent teaching studios of the 1840s, those of Charles Gleyre (who had inherited some students from Paul Delaroche) and François Edouard Picot, under whom Moreau trained.18 While Gleyre’s studio – from which emerged Jean-Léon Gérôme, Gustave Boulanger and other néo-grec painters – was fascinated by Ingres’s Antiochus and Stratonice of 1840 (Fig.10), which offered an exciting new way of conceiving antique subjects, Picot’s studio was enthralled by Ingres’s female nudes, especially Venus Anadyomene (1807–48; Musée Condé, Chantilly) and La Source (Fig.11). Whereas the
1 T. Gautier: ‘Salon de 1852’, La Presse (4th May 1852): ‘Le véritable maître de M. Moreau est Delacroix. Il en procède directement’. 2 A. Brisson: ‘L’ami du peintre’, Le Temps (2nd December 1899), (declaration recalled by Moreau’s friend Henri Rupp): ‘Je rêve de créer un art épique qui ne soit pas un art d’école’. Jean Paladilhe, following an oral tradition, states that Moreau pronounced these words before Chassériau’s decor at the Cour des Comptes; J. Paladilhe and J. Pierre: Gustave Moreau, Paris 1980, p.10. 3 See E. Brugerolles et al., eds.: exh. cat. Quand Moreau signait Chassériau, Paris (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts) 2005. 4 See S. Patrie: ‘“Ma fidélité au souvenir de Chassériau” (Gustave Moreau)’, Mélanges en hommage à Dominique Brachlianoff, Cahiers du musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, special issue (2003), pp.86–91. 5 P. Cooke, ed.: Ecrits sur l’art par Gustave Moreau, Fontfroide 2002, II, p.315: ‘De l’imagination théâtrale et faussement, matériellement surexcitée’; ‘Absence complète des lois qui font parler aux yeux l’arabesque’ (hereafter cited as Cooke 2002). 6 Cooke 2002, II, p.316: ‘Toute cette décadence rhétoricienne en dessin et en couleur est, depuis les Carrache, devenue notre seule école d’art’. 7 Cooke 2002, II, p.316: ‘une rhétorique insipide’; ‘Ce système de complémentaires, quelle niaiserie! Où sont nos Flamands et nos bons primitifs italiens?’. 8 H. Focillon: La Peinture aux XIXe et XXe siècles, Paris 1991 (1st ed. 1928), II, p.88: ‘il fut touché de la grâce préraphaélite au cours d’un séjour en Italie’. 9 Cooke 2002, I, p.171: ‘remonter les courants pour retrouver la vraie, la belle tradition’. 10 Cooke 2002, II, p.319: ‘Est-ce une illusion? Est-ce une erreur de penser qu’il n’y a pas
d’art, pas de don naturel, rien qui puisse être admiré et qui se puisse juger favorablement dans ces œuvres de M., G., C. et tutti quanti? / On en est arrivé avec cette prétendue conscience dans l’imitation de la nature, dans le genre, l’histoire, le paysage, on en est arrivé à cette négation complète des seules qualités qui soient dignes d’être admirées chez l’artiste: l’imagination, le caprice, le sentiment’. 11 Cooke 2002, II, p.324: ‘le dernier coup porté à la peinture dite de style’; ‘une drôlerie sérieusement présentée’. 12 Cooke 2002, II, p.325: ‘bouillabaisse de maîtres’; ‘le triomphe du chic’. 13 H. Evenepoel: Lettres à mon père, ed. D. Derrey-Capon, Brussels 1994, I, p.320: ‘Manet avait un œil d’une finesse très grande, mais chez lui, absence totale de style et la matière en est détestable!’. 14 Cooke 2002, II, p.332: ‘Gargouilles. [. . .] et avec cela du talent, beaucoup de talent, mais gâché par énormément de charlatanisme’. 15 Evenepoel, op. cit. (note 13), I, p.312 (21st April 1894): ‘Je vois des gens doux et bons comme Mr Redon qui est un sincère, et dans lequel il y a certes le développement d’un cerveau peu banal, mais enfin, quel triste résultat’. 16 See A. Carrington Shelton: Ingres and his Critics, Cambridge 2005, chapter 5. 17 L. Lagrange: ‘La Mort de M. Ingres’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1st February 1867), ‘Bulletin mensuel’, p.206, cited in P. Mainardi: ‘The Death of History Painting in France, 1867’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6/100 (1982), p.219: ‘champion muet des principes du Beau’. 18 J. Whiteley: ‘The Revival in Painting of Themes Inspired by Antiquity in MidNineteenth-Century France’, unpublished D.Phil. diss. (University of Oxford, 1972).
GUSTAVE MOREAU’S DEBT to Eugène Delacroix has been recog-
the burlingto n m a g a z i n e • c l v 1 • a p r i l 2 0 1 4
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