In a period spanning from the 1850s to the 1880s, a number of French painters adapted the Dutch model to re-imagine the group as a subject for art, representing friends and colleagues as communities sharing the same artistic aims. Composing artist’ group portraiture had been a tradition in France since the end of the eighteenth-century. Bridget Alsdorf in her study on this topic defines the genre as “a representation of distinct, recognizable individuals whose association with each other, as it is represented in the picture, is a statement of solidarity, collective interest, or rediscovery of the group portraiture when he decided to pay homage to Cézanne.
43 Bridget Abigail Alsdorf, The art of association: Fantin-Latour and the modern group portrait, Ph. D.
dissertation, Berkeley University of California, 2008, p. 16
44 Also, Bridget Abigail Alsdorf indicates that Alain Bonnet’s Artists en groupe: La représentation de la communauté des artistes dans la peinture du XIXe siècle published in 2007 examines the
proliferation of artist group portraits in the nineteenth-century painting. Bonnet covered a remarkable range of genres: art-historical pantheon paintings representing artists from the ancient to modern period, such as Paul Delaroche’s Hémicycle in the École des Beaux-Arts (1837-41); the studio group portraits, such as Boilly’s Une Réunion d’artistes; modern life scenes in which the artists used other artists as models, as in Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette (1876); paintings showing artists at official, ceremonial functions such as François-Joseph Heim’s Charles X distribuant des recompenses aux artistes à la fin du Salon de 1824 (1824); the dispersion of community in avant-garde painting of the twentieth-century;
group portraits conceived as homages or manifestos, such as Fantin-Latour’s Hommage à Delacroix (1864), Paul Cézanne’s Apothéose de Delacroix (c. 1894), William Orpen’s Hommage à Manet (1909), Paul Girieud’s Hommage à Gauguin (1906), and Maurice Denis’ Hommage à Cézanne (1900). Quoted from Bridget Abigail Alsdorf, The art of association: Fantin-Latour and the modern group portrait, Ph.
D. dissertation, Berkeley University of California, 2008, pp. 20-26
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If we trace back to the origins of the genre of group portraiture, especially artists forming in a group in an interior, we can see the first painting of this genre began with the nineteenth-century French artist Louis-Léopold Boilly.45 Boilly’s painting sets an important precedent for the studio group portraits genre and his strategy to shape artists as an association in a group can be seen as an ethos of artist’s social character and their privileged place in a community.46
3-1. Louis-Léopold Boilly
The painting of the French Revolution and Napoleonic empire painter Louis-Léopold Boilly Réunion d'artistes dans l'atelier d'Isabey (Fig. 7) exhibited in the Salon of 1798 constitutes one of the first examples of the genre of group portraiture.47 It presents thirty one fashionable artists congregating under the gaze of Minerva in an open studio. Boilly show them engaging themselves in conversation, study and mediation, which implies the formation of a new type of élite among artists.48 Most important of all, this painting might be the first to envision the studio as a public space, rather than simply present it as a private place.
Being an outsider of the Salon, Boilly extended the eighteenth-century tradition of les grands hommes to the modern art world by depicting a group of artists gathering around another outsider artist Jean-Baptiste Isabey’s studio,49 with the
45 Ibid., p. 6
46 Bridget Abigail Alsdorf, Fellow men: Fantin-Latour and the problem of the group in
Nineteenth-century French painting, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 12
47 There is another situation that artist depicts a group of dead artists getting together, giving their cult to the dead artists to conjure up the past. The two famous examples are Ingres’ L'Apothéose d'Homère in 1827 and Paul Delaroche’s L'Hémicycle des Beaux-Arts (1841). However, Hommage à Cézanne was not modeled on both of them. See Oskar Bätschmann, Eileen Martin (trans.), The artist in the modern world: a conflict between Market and self-expression, Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997, pp.
112-113
48 Ibid.
49 As the nominative subject in Boilly’s painting, Jean-Baptiste Isabey was an especially important figure because he represented the expanding ambitions of previously marginalized artists in the 1790s.
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portraits of old masters in roundels running along the ceiling.50 In contrast to the juxtaposition of old masters and contemporary artists, Boilly placed the sculpture of Minerva and Isabey painting on an easel to indicate the studio’s artistic character. To underscore this aspect, he also depicted two females at work on the right and left wall in the background: the feminine allegories of painting and sculpture.
According to Susan L. Siegfried, this complicated painting is a protest against the French Royal Academy.51 As a contestant against the Academicians and the Salon, Boilly combined the idea of a conversation piece with a connoisseur’s club or a pantheon of thirty one non-Academy figures belonging to a variety genres and artistic fields such as painters, writers, architects, sculptors, actors and musicians.52 He staked a claim for the studio as a public social sphere and constituted a declaration of the independence of French artists standing against the academic system — since the Salon was regarded as the imperial institution and its appearance became a matter of official concern.53 These groups of identifiable individuals had turned the portrait into a painting of modern life that presented contemporary artists as a new kind of liberal men in an atelier.54 This painting tried to compose the studio as a public space, as well as a place for self-promotion, affiliation, and defining a lineage. Une Réunion d'Artistes dans l'Atelier d'Isabey established the viability of such subjects in France,
50 Apparently Boilly employed a symbolism of artistic lineage. See Susan L. Siegfried, The art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: modern life in Napoleonic France, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 96-97
51 Ibid.
52 These thirty one figures included eighteen painters, three sculptors, three architects, two engravers, one composer, one tragedian, one actor, one singer. See Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, “Hands off: gender, anxiety, and artistic identity in the atelier in Boilly, Mayer and Balzac”, in Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Vol. 10, no. 1 (April 2008), p. 4
53 Bridget Abigail Alsdorf, The art of association: Fantin-Latour and the modern group portrait, Ph. D.
dissertation, Berkeley University of California, 2008, p. 7
54 According to Susan L. Siegfried, the representation of the public face of society was the most important and new development in Boilly’s art after the Revolution in France. Boilly’s interest in staging a portrait was thoroughly consistent with the eighteenth-century understanding of the word
“character”, which emphasized the social nature and construction of identity. See Annie Scottez-De Wambrechies, Boilly: un grand peintre français de la Révolution à la Restauration, Lille: Musée des Beaux-Arts,1988, p. 95
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which celebrated and contributed to the modern artists in subject choice, exhibition, and professional association, made a grand statement about the artists as a public figure with an intimate community.55 Boilly developed a model constituting the artist’s group portrait that transformed the uncertainty of the studio’s status as private or public, and played a significant role in establishing artists’ social identity of the group during the post-revolutionary period.
3-2. Gustave Courbet
However, though Boilly’s work was the first example presenting a group of artists assembled in a studio, he has never been mentioned by critics when Hommage à Cézanne exhibited. The first example mentioned and related to Denis’ group by the critics is Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre, subtitled allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (Fig. 8) exhibited in his one-man show in 1855. Courbet’s work combines the theme of a painter involved in the act of creating, along with a group of people in his studio.56 Courbet puts himself in profile in the center of his studio. He is painting a landscape on an easel in front of him with a naked woman standing beside him.57 Judging from his letter, Courbet separated his
55 However, Boilly’s painting entered to the Louvre in 1911, so Denis and his circle probably did not know it before he finished Hommage à Cézanne.
56 Originally, Courbet had hoped to exhibit this painting in the Exposition Universelle des Beaux-Arts held in Paris in 1855, but the official jury rejected his paintings.
57 In the letter Courbet wrote to his friend and supporter Champfleury, mentioning his idea of the composition of L’Atelier du peintre: “In it are the people who thrive on life and those who thrive on death; it is society at its best, its worst, and its average…the scene is laid in my studio in Paris, and the picture is divided into two parts. I am painting in the centre; on the right are the shareholders [,] that are my friends,the workers, [and] the art collectors. On the left the others are the world of trivialities;
the common people, the destitute, the poor, the wealthy, the exploited, the exploiters…It is the moral and physical tale of my atelier…in a word, it is how I see society with its concerns and its passions; it is the world that comes to me to be painted… ”. The original version is:“C’est l’histoire morale et physique de mon atelier: première partie; ce sont les gens qui me servent, me soutiennent dans mon idée et participent à mon action. Ce sont les gens qui vivent de la vie...La scène se passe dans mon atelier à Paris; le tableau est divisé en deux parties; je suis au milieu, peignant, à droite sont les actionnaires, c’est-à-dire les amis, les travailleurs, les amateurs du monde de l’art. A gauche, l’autre monde de la vie triviale, le peuple, la misère, la pauvreté, la richesse, les exploités, les exploiteurs; les gens qui vivent de la mort. Dans le fond, contre la muraille, sont pendus les tableaux du Retour de la Foire, les Baigneuses, et le tableau que je peins..C’est l’histoire morale et physique de mon atelier...En
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audience into two parts (as did Boilly) corresponding to various social classes. He portrays his patrons, friends, art dealers and collectors58 along with an audience standing for various contemporary social classes.59 The composition of this painting is an allegory full of symbols rather than a reality in the painter’s studio.60 With its ambiguous title, this painting has allured numerous scholars trying to unlock its iconographic program.61 Also, from another viewpoint Courbet might have been influenced by the concept of the Netherlandish group portrait such as Rembrandt’s Night-watch, Christ preaching the remission of Sins, and Joost van Craesbeeck’s The artist’s studio.62 L’Atelier du peintre established self-portraiture, group portraiture, and studio depictions as ambitious genres on the level of painting; it also set up the atelier as a privileged space of personal presentation.63 This fusion of sources superimposing the format and the tripartite organization linked to the narrative
un mot, c’est ma manière de voir la société dans ses intérêts et ses passions. C’est le monde qu se fait peindre chez moi.” Quoted from Benedict Nicolson, Courbet: the studio of the painter, London:
Penguin Books Ltd, 1973, p. 13, and the French version see Clive Bell, “L’Atelier de Courbet”, in The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 36, No. 202 (Jan., 1920), p. 3
58 The majority of these figures are painted from portraits already executed by Courbet himself.
Among the figures can be identified are Alphonse Promayet, Alfred Bruyas, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Urbain Cuénot, Max Buchon, François Sabatier, Karoline Sabatier-Ungher, appolonie Sabatier and her lover Alfred Mosselmann, Champfleury and Charles Baudelaire. See Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Laurence des Cars, Michel Hilaire, Bruno Mottin, Bertrand Tillier, Gustave Courbet, New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008, p. 221
59 In a letter Courbet wrote to his friend Louis Français, expressing his equivocal attitude on L’Atelier du peintre: “Perhaps you would like to know the subject of my painting. It will take so long to explain that I want to let you guess when you see it. It is the story of my atelier, what goes on there morally and physically. It is fairly mysterious, it will keep people guessing.” In Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (ed.), Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 135
60 Numerous attempts have been made by scholars to show that the skull on the newspaper symbolizes the death of journalism; guitar, dagger, buckled shoe and plumed hat at the huntsman’s feet symbolize the death of romanticism. See Benedict Nicolson, Courbet: the studio of the painter, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1973
61 For instance, the studio is in part a Fourierist allegory for Linda Nochlin; for Alan Bowness it is a modern artist’s declaration of independence, and the absolute freedom to create what he wants to create;
for Werner Hofmann considered the dense layering of fundamental themes such as the ages of man, the social tensions of the mid-nineteenth century, the metamorphosis of womanhood, and the conflict between the claims of higher truth and fidelity to objective fact; for James Henry Rubin it is a mainly Proudhonian meditation on work, nature, the artist, and the social question generally; for Toussaint it is a complex, possibly subversive political statement charged with Masonic symbolism, etc. See Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London, 1990, p.
157
62 Benedict Nicolson, Courbet: the studio of the painter, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1973, pp. 70-73
63 Bridget Abigail Alsdorf, The art of association: Fantin-Latour and the modern group portrait, Ph. D.
dissertation, Berkeley University of California, 2008, p. 9
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requirements of history painting, portraiture, and popular images resulted in a unique aesthetic of collage and transgressive quotation.64 By depicting a particular intellectual or aesthetic group in favor of a political and artistic revolution, Courbet adopted a strategy similar to Boilly’s group with more complicated groups of social classes and transformed the Bourgeois-like studio into a disordered studio to create
“allegorical” dimensions of his artistic life. He nevertheless invented a way of painting that presented an artist within his creation and in the company of his fellow friends and supporters.65
3-3. Henri Fantin-Latour
Another important artist who developed the genre of group portrait mentioned by the critics was Henri Fantin-Latour. Fantin-Latour’s serial experiments using a group of artists, poets and musicians between the 1860s to the 1880s had influenced the development of the group portrait in France. His eminent group of five portraitures usually combined half-length portraits with a painting-within-the-painting and a specific field of artistic allegiance (painting, poetry, and music).66 Fantin-Latour’s group portraits use a formula that included his fellow colleagues and friends dedicated to their artistic expression and interpersonal relationship. In Hommage à Delacroix, Fantin applied Delacroix’s portrait and palette to indicate the artistic allegiance of the group. In Un Coin de table, he painted Ernest d'Hervilly reading a book to imply a literary context. In Autour du Piano, he set the piano in the center to express homage to music. In this aspect, Fantin-Latour’s serial group portraits pay homage to painting,
64 Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Laurence des Cars, Michel Hilaire, Bruno Mottin, Bertrand Tillier, Gustave Courbet, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008, p. 221
65 Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Laurence des Cars, Michel Hilaire, Bruno Mottin, Bertrand Tillier, Gustave Courbet, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008, p. 220
66 Fantin-Latour’s five larged-scale group portrait between 1864 and 1885 are Hommage à Delacroix, 1864; Le Toast! Hommage à la Vérité, 1865; Un Atelier aux Batignolles, 1870; Un coin de table, 1872;
and Autour du piano, 1885. See Bridget Abigail Alsdorf, The art of association: Fantin-Latour and the modern group portrait, Ph. D. dissertation, Berkeley University of California, 2008, pp. 1-2
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literature, and music.67 He not only succeeded in interpreting the tradition of the group portrait but also initiated an untried formula of this type. Among his works, the most famous one was Hommage à Delacroix (Fig. 6). Painted in 1864, this painting definitely strongly influenced Denis’ Hommage à Cézanne. Following Fantin-Latour, Denis presented a group of contemporary artists paying homage to their admired artists in a celebrated composition. In both cases Delacroix’s self-portrait and Cézanne’s still life are the center of gravity of the composition.
Hommage à Delacroix shows ten black suit-dressed painters, critics and writers assembled in a blurred interior. They form two rows around a self-portrait of Eugène Delacroix.68 In this composition, Delacroix’s portrait is displayed in the center and hung on the wall. His position makes him taller than his other admirers, revealing his status among these artists. Also, the arrangement of the figures might reflect the fact that Fantin-Latour, Whistler, and Legros had been close friends since the late 1850s;
they form a triangle at the left side.69 This arrangement also indicates that Fantin-Latour and Legros are the two leaders among the painters who had been so impressed by Manet’s Guitarrero that they later formed a group in Manet’s studio — the Batignolles school.
Hommage à Delacroix was completed after Delacriox passed away on August 13, 1863.70 Its dark composition reminds us of the solemn funeral held after Delacroix’s
67 According to Udo Kultermann, Fantin-Latour was trying to give a new idea on homage painting to a specific person. See Udo Kultermann, “Fantin Latour’s Hommage à Delacroix and the formation of homage painting”, inJournal of Art History, Vol. 48, No. 1, 1979, p. 31.
68 From left to right and front to back, these figures can be recognized as Louis Edmond Duranty, Henri Fantin-Latour wears a white shirt with a palette, James Whistler stands in the left of Delacroix’s portrait and holds a bouquet, Jules Champfleury, Chales Baudelaire the critic, Louis Cordier, Alphonse Legros, Eugéne Delacroix, Edouard Manet stands in the right side, Félix Bracquemond, and Albert de Balleroy.
69 Fantin-Latour and Whistler met on October 8, 1858 in the Louvre, where Fantin was busy copying a work by Veronese. However, Whistler ended the friendship with Legros after 1864. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or, the face of painting in the 1860s, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 7
70 Eugène Delacriox had died on August 13, 1863, a year just before this painting completed. As a leading person in the nineteenth-century France, only a few mourners honored him at his funeral on 17
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death. Fantin-Latour referred to Delacroix’s photograph as well as to his self-portrait from the Louvre (Fig. 9).71 By using Delacroix’s portrait and a specific group of friends and admirers, this painting not only memorializes the death of the Romantic painter, but also asserts a relationship of affiliation between the Romanticism of the 1830s and the young artists,72 as defended by Duranty in 1867: “Controversial artists pay homage to the memory of one of the greatest controversial artists of our time.’’73
Meanwhile, like Courbet, Manet and Edgar Degas, Fantin-Latour was a great admirer of the seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits.74 The study of group portraiture in Dutch painting as a genre was rediscovered by the nineteenth-century French artists and scholars, who reused and adjusted the formation of group
August 1863. In order to memorize him, Fantin-Latour took Delacroix as a very important figure on literature, critic, and art, having a tremendous influence on the young generation. Thus Fantin-Latour’s selection for these ten figures represents the dimensions on literary (Baudelaire, Jules Champfleury), critic (Louis Edmond Durantly), and art (Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Manet, Louis Cordier, Alphonse Legros, Félix Bracquemond, Albert de Balleroy). Udo Kultermann, “Fantin Latour’s Hommage à
August 1863. In order to memorize him, Fantin-Latour took Delacroix as a very important figure on literature, critic, and art, having a tremendous influence on the young generation. Thus Fantin-Latour’s selection for these ten figures represents the dimensions on literary (Baudelaire, Jules Champfleury), critic (Louis Edmond Durantly), and art (Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Manet, Louis Cordier, Alphonse Legros, Félix Bracquemond, Albert de Balleroy). Udo Kultermann, “Fantin Latour’s Hommage à