Catalogue-2014-Jean-Luc-Baroni

Charles Émile Auguste Durant called Carolus-Duran
Lille 1837-1917 Paris
20 Portrait of Marie-Anne Carolus-Duran, the Painter’s Eldest Daughter.
Oil on canvas. Signed Carolus Duran upper left and dated 77 top right.
32.5 x 24.5 cms. (12 ½ x 9 ¾ in).
Provenance : Private collection, Bordeaux.
Born in Lille to poor parents, Charles Auguste Emile Durant was befriended early on by Zacharie Astruc,
the art critic and journalist. Thanks to his friend, he came to Paris, changed his name from simple Durant
to the more glamorous, hyphenated Carolus-Duran and started attending the Académie Suisse. With a
card from the Louvre to enable him to copy Old Masters in his pocket, he concentrated on studying his
favourites, Velasquez and Goya as well as Raphael and Van Dyck. In 1862, having won the Prix Wicar
in his native Lille, he was able to travel to Italy where he stayed for four years. In 1866, he achieved
his ambition to travel to Spain and set up a studio in Toledo for the summer. From 1870, his career as a
portraitist took off thanks to the success of La Dame au Gant, (Musée d’Orsay) a portrait of his wife. He
opened two paying ateliers, one for men and one for women, which became extremely fashionable and
attracted many interesting painters of the time. John Singer Sargent started attending the atelier in 1874
(he was only eighteen) and Carolus later helped him to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, admiring his great
talent. They would remain lifelong friends and Sargent always acknowledged that Carolus had taught
him two things: the importance of making numerous sketches before starting work on a painting and the
mastery of loose brushwork. Sargent painted Carolus in 1879, a work now in the Stirling and Francine
Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, and the dedication is telling: A mon cher maître M. Carolus Duran,
son élève attentionné, John S. Sargent. It shows Carolus as a sturdy, humorous and self-assured artist with
dark eyes and the Mediterranean colouring which his children all inherited.
Although Carolus-Duran is often rather mistakenly associated with more academic portraitists like
Cabanel, Hébert and Bonnat, he saw himself quite differently and in a letter to Felix Bracquemond dated
1904, he confirmed: I was a Realist and absolutely detested the Academy of our youth. His “gods” were,
in fact, Delacroix and especially Velasquez. He was also a great friend of Edouard Manet whom he met
when he came to live in Paris in 1855 and remained close to until his untimely death in 1883. Manet’s
biographer Adolphe Tabarant noted: Manet saw Carolus every day. He was one of his closest friends, one
of the very rare ones, four or five at the most, he would address as “tu”. Carolus painted his friend’s portrait
in 1877 - a work now in the , Musée d’Orsay - at the time when they both frequented the fashionable cafés,
Café Caron and the Molière on the rue de l’Odéon where Carolus also met Alphonse Legros, Whistler and
Fantin-Latour.
The exhibition held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille in 2003 1 reassessed Carolus-Duran’s place in the world
of late 19 th century French art. His reputation had suffered due to accusations that his work was insincere
simply because it was fashionable and he made money. A review of the exhibition concludes that the artist’s
portraits show his true strengths and “many of these are far removed from the static society images one would
expect to find from consulting the earlier literature”. As Emile Zola understood, Carolus-Duran was “un élève
de la nouvelle école” who leaned towards a modernist approach 2 . A remarkable study of the Paris training of
American painters published in 1991 also documented that he had taught no less than eighty-one American
painters in his studio, using the unorthodox method of both drawing and painting from the live model and
thereby being a great source of inspiration to the movement of American impressionism 3 .
On 30 th January 1868, he married the beautiful Pauline Marie Charlotte Croizette (1839-1912), also
a painter. They had three children whom he used constantly as models, with Marie-Anne, his eldest,
seemingly his favourite. He was particularly attracted by the spontaneity of his children of whom he made
many informal drawings and oil sketches. In 1889, Marie-Anne, who had turned into a dark-haired beauty,
married the playwright Georges Feydeau (1862-1921).
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