13/2/23 - Acquisition - Montargis, Musée Girodet - The Girodet Museum in Montargis has acquired from the Galerie Talabardon & Gautier a painting by Ary Scheffer representing The Farewells of Girodet to His Workshop (ill. 1).
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- 1. Ary Scheffer (1795-1858)
The Farewells of Girodet to His Workshop, 1824-25
Oil on canvas - 46 x 38 cm
Montargis, Musée Girodet
Photo: Galerie Talabardon & Gautier - See the image in its page
There were many accounts of the painter’s death, as Bruno Chenique reminds us in his biochronology of the artist, which accompanied the Louvre’s Girodet retrospective [1] (see article).
The father of the painter Charles-Philippe Larivière, a pupil of Girodet, wrote to him on 25 December 1824: "I have this from a pupil of Monsieur Larrey Médecin - on Sunday 5 December 4 days before his death, Monsieur Girodet knowing that Monsieur Larrey was to operate on him the next day in the morning got up at about 4 o’clock in the evening, he was in great pain not being able to urinate, he went up to his studio and there having sinister forebodings, He said a touching farewell to his studio in the presence of this young doctor, to his brushes, to his palette, to his studies, to the unfinished portrait that you saw, and went downstairs to bed, from where he was only to leave to go to the ground, could we not make a sketch of this fact? [2] "
Girodet had indeed been suffering from bladder pains for years. Larrey, his doctor, concluded that it was a tumour and decided to operate on him without much hope of success. Let us listen this time to Delécluze, a painter and pupil of David’s and a famous critic: "The moments that preceded those of the operation were painful for Girodet, as far as one can tell. If one is to believe those who were close to him, struck as if by a death sentence he had not expected, he went up to his studio, bid farewell, as it were, to all the objects he used to practise his art, and expressed his deep regret at seeing himself torn away, by an inevitable death, from the occupations he had cherished all his life [3]".
Finally, in 1829, Julie Candeille, who shared the painter’s life at the time of his death, wrote: "He looked around his studio...he stopped for a while on these incomplete studies... - Farewell beautiful painting!..." said finally with a groaning voice the successor of Michelangelo, Raphael and Poussin!... [4]"
Ary Scheffer painted this work very shortly after the funeral of the painter, most likely based on direct testimony of the scene. In this unfinished painting, we see Girodet, supported by a figure in blue and accompanied by another, probably the young doctor mentioned by Larivière, waving goodbye to his studio. The only painting whose subject can be distinguished on the left, an Assumption of the Virgin, is perhaps a copy after one of Nicolas Poussin’s most famous paintings.
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- 2. Ary Scheffer (1795-1858)
The Death of Géricault, 1824
Oil on canvas - 38 x 46 cm
Paris, Musée Carnavalet
Photo: Paris Musées (public domain) - See the image in its page
Let us recall that Scheffer is also the author of a painting [5] showing The Death of Géricault, which disappeared in the same year as Girodet (ill. 2), in 1824: the latter on 9 December, Géricault on 26 January. While it is difficult to see these two paintings as pendants - they are the same size, but one is a horizontal composition, the other a vertical one - they were nonetheless conceived with the same intention of celebrating two masters of the French school, whose deaths within months of each other marked their contemporaries. The death of artists, especially those of previous centuries, was a frequent theme among painters of the first half of the nineteenth century.
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- 3. Alexandre Menjaud (1773-1832)
The Farewells of Girodet to His Workshop, 1826
Oil on canvas - 70 x 54 cm
Montargis, Musée Girodet
Photo: Musée Girodet - See the image in its page
This painting by Scheffer will join in the collections that of Alexandre Menjaud, a pupil of Baron Regnault, of identical subject (ill. 3). This work, painted in 1826, that is to say two years after Girodet’s death, if it shows the same subject, does so in a less realistic and more anecdotal way. By not finishing his painting, Scheffer has paradoxically better rendered the desperate atmosphere of the scene, the painter standing out against an indistinct brown background, his livid features very similar to those of his death mask, of which the museum also keeps one of the thirty copies that were printed, and from which Scheffer was certainly inspired.