7/3/23 - Acquisitions - Paris, Musée de la Vie romantique - Housed in the former home of the painter Ary Scheffer, the Musée de la Vie romantique has a remarkable collection of the artist’s works, which has recently been enriched by a new painting (ill. 1) and a new drawing (ill. 2). The first was sold for 3,400 euros (without fees) at the partial auction of the exceptional Brooks Beaulieu Romantic Collection organized by Artcurial on November 10, a sale that also attracted the attention of the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, which bought eight lots (see the news item of 25/11/22). The second was offered to the museum by its Society of Friends after it had acquired it from the Galerie Chaptal.
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- 1. Ary Scheffer (1795-1858)
The Lament of the Abandoned Girl, c. 1824
Oil on canvas - 24,5 x 19 cm
Paris, Musée de la Vie romantique
Photo: Artcurial - See the image in its page
Entitled The Complaint of the Abandoned Girl, the small canvas features a young woman with long blonde hair, dressed in a wispy white tunic. She is sitting in profile on a rock facing a stormy sea. As Gaëlle Rio, the director of the Musée de la Vie romantique, points out in her detailed notice, two interpretations of the subject coexist, literal illustration or allegory. Ary Scheffer, in the literary vein that he embraced from the years 1820-1830 - witness his series of works based on Goethe’s Faust or his compositions inspired by Byron or Dante’s The Divine Comedy -, could have illustrated here a ballad by the German poet Friedrich von Schiller entitled The Maiden’s Lament, initially published in 1799 before being set to music, notably by Franz Schubert, in 1811: "The clouds fast gather, The forest-oaks roar ; A maiden is sitting ; Beside the green shore,— ; The billows are breaking with might, with might ; And she sighs aloud in the darkling night ; Her eyelid heavy with weeping : "My heart’s dead within me, The world is a void; To the wish it gives nothing, Each hope is destroyed. I have tasted the fulness of bliss below, I have lived, I have loved". A second possible reading is that the tormented girl and the tumultuous landscape that echoes her agitation, a famous leitmotif of Romantic iconography, represent an allegory of Melancholy and Despair. In this sense, it is worth mentioning one of the many known engravings of the painting, the lithograph by Zéphirin Belliard kept by the Dordrechts Museum entitled Désespoir (Despair).
Several autograph versions of this composition are known in the same small format. The museum in Dordrecht - Ary Scheffer’s birthplace -, which owns part of the artist’s studio collection, following the donation of his daughter, keeps a version signed and dated "Ary Scheffer 1824" that Leo Ewals, a specialist of the artist, lists under the name Hé, Sans Espoir ! in his reference book published in 1987, Ary Scheffer, sa vie et son œuvre. The Dutch museum also possesses two undated drawings that may be preparatory to this composition, a watercolor and a black pencil entitled Le Désespoir. Signed but undated, like the version that goes to the Musée de la Vie romantique, another version is in the collections of the Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot in Clermont-Ferrand, also donated by the artist’s daughter. A slightly larger anonymous copy is also in the Langres museum. Finally, Gaëlle Rio mentions a variation of the composition where the young woman is adorned with a red cloth. Here again, several versions are known. One, entitled Naufragée (Wrecked) and dated 1826, is listed by Leo Ewals. Catalogued in the Yakountschikoff sale in Paris in 1870, it could be the canvas sold at Aguttes on 24 October 2011. Other versions of this variation have been sold on the art market in recent years, at Christie’s New York or at Leclère in Marseille in June 2010 and 2008.
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- 2. Ary Scheffer (1795-1858)
Hamlet
Pen and Indian ink, grey wash, watercolor and gouache on paper - 17.3 x 10.5 cm
Paris, Musée de la Vie romantique
Photo: Paris, Musée de la Vie romantique - See the image in its page
As for the drawing offered to the Museum, it joins in its collections a watercolor featuring a very similar male character, Scene of Hamlet in the Cemetery. A new addition to the corpus of Ary Scheffer’s works of literary inspiration, the beautiful sheet in Indian ink, watercolor and gouache could join the room of the permanent collections devoted to the links between painting and literature. It would be exhibited in rotation (for conservation reasons) alongside paintings inspired by Lord Byron and Walter Scott. If the identification of the character with Hamlet - a sad young man depicted in a three-quarter view, wearing a dark suit and carrying a sword at his waist - is obvious, Gaëlle Rio specifies in her note that according to Leo Ewals it is not known whether the artist ever treated such a subject. In another reference work published in 1937, Ary Scheffer and his time, Marthe Kolb states that Scheffer was an assiduous reader of Shakespeare and Byron. Great lover of theater, it is possible that he saw the troupe of Kemble and Harriet Smithson representing the dramas of Shakespeare at the Odeon. The sheet that now joins the museum was previously exhibited there in 2001 as part of a group of Dessins romantiques français provenant de collections privées (French Romantic Drawings from Private Collections) assembled by Louis-Antoine Prat. It was then presented with a pendant - which reappeared concomitantly on the art market, thus as Louis-Antoine Prat points out in his note - of exactly the same dimensions and with the same techniques, representing a Young Woman Standing by the Water which can be compared to Ophelia.