Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

decoration struck Théophile Gautier who describes
it in the article written on the occasion of his first
visit to the Cour des Comptes: ‘Two women, the first
one dark skinned and lit as if gilded by a sunray, her
black hair plaited and tied with pearls, revealing her
warm shoulders and her lower back over which slips
a sky-blue drapery; the second, white, slender, falling
backwards in a painful movement and trying to lift her
delicate hands weighed down with chains, compose,
with an old man dragged by a foot soldier dressed in
armour, a strikingly pathetic and picturesque group.
The naked backs of the women are painted in rich
impasto, smooth and of a tone which would provoke
envy in the proudest colourist’ 9 .
In discussing this group, Sandoz sees the influence
of the Italian masters and the echoes of Delacroix’s
Sardanapalus of 1827. The style of the present
sketch is particularly free and shows a great sense of
observation in the torsion of the two backs (the fleshtones
of which were originally the other way around,
as we see when comparing the figures to Théophile
Gautier’s description), the fall of the drapery, the
highlight of a gold earring and the tilt of the heads.
Unique amongst the known preparatory works for the
decoration of the Cour des Comptes, this sketch, in its
handling and its quality, is rarer than one would think
in the oeuvre of an artist as prolific as Chassériau 10 .
The rediscovery of this superb sketch for Chassériau’s
most important decorative scheme is of great
importance in the continuing re-evaluation of his
career and of the position he occupies in the history
of 19 th century French painting.
Translated from a text by Isabelle Mayer-Michalon
actual size detail
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