Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

3. William Tell and Gessler, sketch, Guéret, musée
municipal.
4. An Archer and a Gardener, two figures from the tapestry
series ‘Les Mois Lucas’, The British Museum, London.
earlier beginning to the project than was previously
understood. The composition is already in place,
following a diagonal which is maintained as the
principal axis of the large canvas, and the same figures
are present but in different positions; in particular,
Gessler does not fall backwards, he is still solid on
his feet and posed to lunge at William Tell, his sword
raised. The scene from the tale is in fact not exactly the
one adopted for the final composition but rather the
one just before.
William Tell already wears the yellow and red costume
which is traditionally attributed to him, although he
is dressed simply, wearing a hose with slashes at the
knees and an unlaced doublet over a white shirt. In
the final painting the hero wears a much more formal
costume with a red coat over his hose, held by a blue
belt; in the sketch he is already wearing a red beret
but Vincent hesitated over the colour of the feather:
blue here, yellow in the sketch in Guéret and white
in the final picture. Above all it is his position which
completely changes: here he faces the boat, holds his
bow and arrows in his left hand and raises his right arm
against his enemy. In the Salon painting, Tell, bearded
and looking older, is depicted in contrapposto as if in
response to the fury of the elements, in a composition
altogether more turbulent; he seizes his weapon – the
bow has become the legendary crossbow – in his
right hand and balances himself by pushing against
the rocks with his left hand in order to upturn the
boat. While the figure of Mechtal has changed little,
except for the colour of his clothes and the absence
of the beret, that of Gessler has undergone a greater
modification, losing his balance as the boat sinks.
The colours of his costume remain the same as in the
sketch, a red hose, breeches and doublet with blue
and red, but the red cape has been replaced with a
long belted tunic and a short coat trimmed with fur, to
emphasise the tyrant’s extravagance. The costumes are
not those of the Tell’s epoch but rather of the beginning
of the Renaissance. In September 1794, while still at
work on the William Tell, Vincent executed a series of
watercolours of costumes copied from the Gobelins
tapestries, the Mois Lucas, certain details of which
might have inspired him early on in the project (fig.4) 8 .
The landscape in the present sketch is a backdrop
less elaborate than in the final work, for which
Vincent surely looked at known depictions of the
lake of Lucerne, transforming it into a wild and
highly dramatic scene. Only the left part is already
blocked in with mountains and what will become a
storm-filled sky crossed with lightning bolts is here
a blue sky with clouds amassing. But the ‘flattened
rock’ which rises from the waves in the foreground,
as described by Lemierre, is left out of the sketch in
Guéret but reappears in the final picture, attached
to the rocky shore. The artist also added to the
broken mast a sail which has torn loose and flaps
in the wind. The variants between the three known
compositions are too numerous to be described in
detail but above all the essential difference between
the present sketch and the other known depictions is
that it shows a stage in the realization of the project
in which Vincent has not yet decided to present it
as a night scene, a transition which emphasised the
contrasts between light and shade and eventually
gave the work a phantasmagoric slant. That this was
not Vincent’s idea at the beginning is revealed by the
discovery of this splendid preparatory work.
Translated from a text by Isabelle Mayer-Michalon
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