Anne Louis Girodet De Roussy Trioson (1767-1824)

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"The art of the brilliant French maverick Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824) was first presented to the modern public almost forty years ago, in a legendary exhibition held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montargis, the painter's birthplace 100 kilometers south of Paris. For the occasion the Montargis museum was completely emptied, and almost the entire Girodet holdings of the Louvre transferred and installed there. Major loans were secured, and in the end the exhibition included fifty paintings, fifty drawings and numerous prints, illustrated books and documents. A handy catalogue was published, and there were lengthy exhibition reviews in the Art Bulletin and the Burlington Magazine. Held the same year as the Ingres exhibition in Montauban (1967), the Girodet retrospective proved to be an important event of that golden age of early nineteenth-century French painting exhibits, which culminated in 1974 with the international, traveling exhibition David to Delacroix.
After the success of the Girodet exhibition, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montargis was renamed the Musée Girodet. In 1983 an exhibition of Girodet drawings was held there, and a few years later in 1989, Sylvain Bellenger, the director of the Musée Girodet at the time, organized an exhibition of Girodet and Ossianism. Since the 1989 exhibition it has been the driving ambition of Sylvain Bellenger to mount a major retrospective of Girodet's art. Fifteen years later his goal has finally been realized: Girodet opened at the Louvre in September 2005 and will travel on to Chicago, New York and Montreal in the course of the next year and a half. The wait has been well worth it, especially for those of us unable to see the 1967 retrospective\u2014the Girodet exhibition is a triumph.

As the Louvre retrospective amply demonstrates, Girodet was the most creatively and unpredictably subversive of all of David's students. Even before he had fully mastered David's reforms, he began to reject the tenets of David's sober rational program, and explore the possibilities of an art that was more imaginative, poetic and above all idiosyncratic. Girodet entered David's atelier at the age of seventeen in 1784. The following year he painted The Death of Camilla, an exemplary student demonstration of Davidian artistic and moral principles. In the history paintings that immediately follow, however, there are already hints of rebellion, in the form of subtle, pictorial innovations that undermine the aesthetic rigor and stoic heroism of David's reformatory classical style. In the first room of the Louvre exhibition, the visitor can study Girodet's earliest attempts to liberate himself from the Davidian straitjacket. Here one finds Girodet's Prix de Rome of 1789, Joseph Recognized by his Brothers, along with two earlier history paintings of 1787 and 1788 respectively: another Old Testament scene, Nebuchadnezzar Orders the Execution of the Sons of Zedekiah, and a scene from early Roman history, The Assassination of Tatius, King of the Sabines. In these three paintings, one is struck by the delicacy of Girodet's color; he has renounced David's somber earth colors in favor of more recherché tints\u2014iridescent lavender, rose, and cream\u2014all brightened by a more evenly diffused lighting. Enlarging his search for greater artistic refinement, Girodet has also replaced David's simply folded, hanging mantles with elegant, flowing draperies. There are compositional and spatial transformations as well. Girodet has collapsed David's geometrically ordered stage sets, and arranged his actors along single shallow planes, with a marked emphasis on linear grace and a complicated surface design of rhythmically interlocked human forms. Meanwhile, Girodet's narrative has become more urgently dramatic, the gestures and movement of his figures more pressing, and their expressions more intense than in his classically restrained Camilla of 1785. Yet the overall impression of these history paintings remains one of preciosity, and even Girodet's dynamic passages of violence and brutality are curiously elevated to a more rarefied world of art and artifice.

As a recipient of the 1789 Prix de Rome, Girodet left for the French Academy in Rome in the spring of 1790. Once arrived, he began almost immediately to work on The Sleep of Endymion , the painting that marks in many respects the completion of his first phase of pictorial experimentation, and stands as his true declaration of independence from David. Surprisingly, Girodet's earlier history paintings do little to prepare us for either the inventiveness of Endymion, or the ingeniousness of the poetic conceit that is the primary source of the picture's striking originality. Instead of appearing at her beloved's side wearing a human aspect, Girodet's Diana/Luna manifests herself as a pale, silvery moonbeam that enters the bucolic scene through branches carefully parted by an obliging Cupid, and tenderly caresses the graceful form and soft flesh of the sleeping Endymion. Correggio's Jupiter and Io comes to mind, where Zeus, having metamorphosed into a cloud, descends to make love to the ecstatic nymph Io. The two paintings share a related search for the most extreme refinement of erotic sensuality. Regardless of his sources, Girodet's softly sensuous ideal of male beauty, his oblique other-worldly light and his arbitrary treatment of nature are all far removed from the ruddy muscular heroes, the incisive theatrical lighting and the austere realism associated with David's revolutionary art. Even before Endymion was completed Girodet wrote: "I have not yet told M. David what I intend to send to the Academy. In the meantime, I will write to him before the exhibition, for I prefer that he learn it from me. I am attempting to distance myself from his genre as much as possible\u2026." (p. 213). Indeed Girodet has taken David's proposition with its rational, objective handling of moralizing antique themes and turned it on its end, willfully transforming the model into a fanciful vehicle for subjective poetic expression. Some writers on Girodet consider The Sleep of Endymion the first masterpiece of French romantic painting. This may well be true. The Endymion generally hangs upstairs in the great nineteenth-century French painting gallery in the Louvre, but the picture benefits immensely from having been re-hung in its own spotlighted darkened room in the Louvre's temporary exhibition gallery. Not only is the painting's unsightly degraded bitumen all but invisible, but the new installation is more conducive to the private contemplation the picture demands. In the exhibition the Endymion has the look and feel of a highly wrought object of art, appropriately displayed in a black velvet box.

Still in Rome, and very soon after completing Endymion, Girodet was at work on a new history painting, Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes. The subject is a patriotic one: the King of Persia's emissaries, laden with gold and gifts, fail to persuade the celebrated Greek physician to come to the rescue of their plague-ravaged states. The picture was painted for Dr. Trioson, Girodet's close friend, tutor and future adoptive father. Although Girodet's Hippocrates does develop some of the tendencies found in his earlier history paintings, he does not occupy himself in his new composition with further evolving or mastering a single heretical style. Instead, Girodet seems determined here to break new ground, and undertake yet another experimental effort to sabotage the canons of David's severe program. In his Hippocrates Girodet devotes exceptional, even obsessive attention to the archaeological accuracy of the painting's architectural décor, furnishings and props, as well as that of the exotic costumes, coiffures and even the beards of his Persian ambassadors. Girodet's concern with detailed historical reconstruction is complemented by an equally keen interest in elaborating a wide variety of human expression. Each one of the emissaries surrounding Hippocrates has a distinctly different psychological response to the physician's adamant refusal to aid their king and country. The envoys' charged expressions, that far exceed the noble restraint of David's stoic actors, range from anger and astonishment to grief and resignation. Working together, Girodet's novel pictorial priorities lend a literal, anecdotal quality to his new history painting, and the Hippocrates uncannily anticipates the entertaining and histrionic academic paintings of the mid-nineteenth century neo-Greeks.
In January 1793, Girodet narrowly escaped a violent attack on the French Academy that had been provoked by the French Revolutionary Army's Italian campaign. Fearing for his life, he fled Rome for Naples, where he found himself liberated from the constraints of the Academy, and determined to pursue a long-standing enthusiasm for the art of landscape painting. Writing from Naples in March 1793 Girodet announced: "This spring and summer . . . my project is to travel through the environs of Naples, and stay there long enough to extract from this countryside everything of interest that it offers for art. It was in the environs of Rome, that I was going to devote myself this year to the study of landscape, a universal genre of painting to which all others are subordinate" (p. 233). At the sale of Girodet's atelier after his death, there were twenty-four painted landscapes and over a hundred landscape drawings. Only five of Girodet's landscape paintings have since been identified: three are in the Musée Magnin in Dijon, and two in the Louvre exhibition, one from a private collection and the other from the Musée Girodet.1 All five demonstrate Girodet's acute sensitivity to light; his View of Vesuvius (fig. 7), delicately illuminated by an early morning light that plays over the pale green slopes of the volcano, is the finest of the lot. Girodet drew extensively out of doors in nature, and at least one of his landscapes in the Musée Magnin, the impressive Gulf of Sorrento, is evidence that Girodet subscribed to his older contemporary Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes' program of executing oil sketches in the open air, to capture the momentary effects of light, shadow and atmosphere associated with different times of day and changing weather. While the two landscapes in the exhibition have a more composed studio quality, the Magnin sketch displays the freshness and unpretentiousness of the plein-air studies painted by Valenciennes and his followers in the Italian countryside during the 1780s and 90s. Unfortunately, Girodet did not follow up his interest in landscape after his return to France, but when more of his Italian paintings, and especially his oil sketches are identified, Girodet's brief, but intense experience with the art of landscape may well no longer be considered a minor chapter in his career." ~ by Brooks Beaulieu (2005)

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