Horace Vernet

At the 1855 Universal Exhibition, which took the place of the Salon and where foreign schools came to confront the French school, the latter put four painters in the limelight, who benefited from real retrospectives: Ingres, Delacroix, Vernet and Decamps. They were therefore supposed to represent the full diversity of this school. While the first two names were obvious, the last two are not, at least not today. Decamps in particular is relatively forgotten, even though he is well represented in the Louvre. As for Vernet, he has not yet enjoyed the recognition that is due to him, and which was due to him in 1855, even though he was already heavily criticised.

1. View of the Horace Vernet exhibition at the Château de Versailles
Photo: Didier Rykner

See the image in its page

Will the Versailles retrospective finally do him justice? Its relative success makes us fear not. And yet we cannot encourage enough those who have not yet done so to take the road to the château. This exhibition is indeed remarkable, and shows a painter of great talent. Admittedly, he did not have the genius of Ingres or Delacroix. But he certainly didn’t deserve the many attacks made on him by Baudelaire - who was decidedly as bad an art critic as he was a great poet - including this one: "He is the absolute antithesis of the artist".
It is enough to wander through the rooms (ill. 1 and 2) devoted to him for almost another month (and those where he is always present, when he is not hidden behind partitions) to realise that there are few painters as complete as Vernet, even if he did not tackle all the genres (no still lifes, very rare landscapes and the only religious paintings were Old Testament subjects). Many masterpieces, few mediocre paintings. Although he was undoubtedly - the word was almost coined for him - a follower of the "juste milieu" ("middle way"), Romanticism never left him, nor was he a classicist, transforming genre painting into history painting (unless it was the other way round), for which he was criticised.

2. View of the Horace Vernet exhibition at the Château de Versailles
Photo: Didier Rykner

See the image in its page

Horace Vernet’s constant ambiguity is well captured in the excellent catalogue texts (we have not read any mediocre ones). And the enthusiasm that this exhibition and the book that accompanies it have aroused in us undoubtedly gives us the right to state unabashedly the reservations that must nevertheless be expressed about him.
Recent bibliography on Vernet is very poor. There is no monograph: only one exhibition catalogue, of modest size, in 1980 in Paris and Rome, and a catalogue of prints by Pierre Sanchez in 2016. That is all - barring errors and omissions on our part. Vernet is a painter among others in the - this time very numerous - books and catalogues devoted to nineteenth-century art. He therefore richly deserved the tribute paid by Versailles. But in the absence of a much-needed…