WESTLAKE, TX.- Gallery 19C, a Texas based gallery specializing in 19th Century European Paintings, is pleased to announce the sale of two paintings to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Child with a Mask and Fernand Pelez’s poignant depiction of a young beggar boy, aptly titled Petit Misère, were purchased from Gallery 19C at TEFAF MAASTRICHT in March 2023.
Commenting on the sale, Eric Weider, Founder and Polly Sartori, Director of Gallery 19C said: “We are once again deeply honored that two of our paintings will be on public display at the Musée d’Orsay. They will join Alexandre Cabanel’s masterpiece, Le Paradis Perdu, which we sold to the museum in 2017. Nothing means more to us than to see these significant and diverse 19th century painters granted the attention they deserve. There is no greater confirmation of their significance than to hang in the galleries of the Musée d’Orsay.”
Founded in 2016, Gallery 19C is an international gallery with an exclusive focus on European art from the 19th century, one of the richest, most diverse 100 years in the history of art. Gallery 19C celebrates the revolutionaries and innovators – artists such as Delacroix, Courbet, Corot and Millet; they paved the way for the next generation of painters. At the same time, the art of the traditional painters, those who adhered to the long history of Academic standards, is also recognized. These artists, long overlooked, also deserve a place in the pantheon of 19th century art history.
Jean Léon Gérôme and Fernand Pelez have each been singled out and recognized at important museum retrospectives. In 2010-2011, The Spectacular Art of Jean Léon Gérôme was held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Musée d’Orsay and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. In 2009 the Petit Palais in Paris organized a monographic exhibition in honor of Fernand Pelez titled La Parade des Humbles.
Gérôme’s Child with a Mask
Though best known as an Orientalist artist, Gérôme began his career as a leader of the Neo-Grecs, a group of young painters studying with Charles Gleyre (1808-1874) and Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). Inspired by Delaroche’s “new history paintings,” which integrated scenes of everyday life into traditionally didactic compositions, as well as by classical Greek art, the recent discoveries of frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and their own travels, the Neo-Grecs painted antique genre scenes that were often imbued with a touch of eroticism or humor. Such subjects were the perfect vehicle for the young Gérôme to display his love of drama, theater, gesture, and costume – elements which all appear in this engaging and enigmatic work.
The intimacy with which this child’s face is rendered suggests familiarity, though his identity and relationship to the artist remain unknown. Gérôme often asked close relatives to sit for him, and dedicated works to family and friends. To the lawyer Léon Cléry, husband of Gérôme’s sister-in-law Blanche, he gave a study for Le Marchand de masques (also known as Les Comédiens, or Scène de théâtre and now at the Château de Compiègne), representing actors in antiquity and replete with the kinds of masks seen here. The present painting was also owned by Blanche, suggesting that they might, thematically at least, have been meant as a pair.
Another, smaller tondo featuring a child is also in evidence, and has been dated to 1844 (no. 9.5, Ackerman 2000; figure 2). Both children in these works are shown in three-quarters view, and the paintings have a similar light source and palette. They face away from each other and, when viewed together, resemble bookends that were conceived of at once. Visible brushstrokes in the lower left of the present tondo, however, indicate that it was left unfinished, while the other bears a “concluding” signature and inscription.
The meaning of the portrait mask in this work is another mystery yet to be solved. With its intertwined snakes forming a beard and an unruly shock of flame-red hair, the face provides a stark contrast to the child’s cherubic, if serious, countenance. The gravity of the little boy’s expression is unexpected, but entirely befitting his costume. This features a cloak and a dagger, which may both have been studio props.
Additional examples of tondos with masks exist in Gérôme’s oeuvre in the form of paintings and drawings. A mask of Medusa is also known to have been displayed in his studio, along with others of a similar kind.
This note was written by Dr. Emily M. Weeks, author of the impending comprehensive revision of Gérôme’s catalogue raisonné.
Pelez’s Petit Misere
In December 1913, just a few months after Fernand Pelez’s death, an exhibition of his most important works was held in his studio at the foot of Montmartre in Paris. A reproduction of this painting depicting a young street urchin wearing a grown-man’s threadbare jacket and holding an equally oversized bourgeois top hat, his delicate skin tones overlaid with a veil of dirt, adorned the cover of the catalogue. It was accompanied by a single word: “misère.”
While this term in French usually translates as simply physical poverty, in the nineteenth century “misère,” as Linda Nochlin has shown, connoted a condition of “poverty felt morally" and bearing upon all humanity. First shown at the Salon of 1886, this painting entitled Petit Misère, combines meticulous detail with emotional distance to elicit a broadly sympathetic view of the conditions of the industrial underclass. Rather than depicting a narrative scene, misery is here conveyed through the young boy’s physical appearance, his scavenged and tattered clothing, and physical proximity to the viewer in the shallow space of the picture. Lacking the idealization of the history painting or religious martyr scenes upon which he was trained, Pelez painted this figure naturalistically and almost as if “there is mud in his brush,” as the critic Émile Henriot described it. The young boy stands in the doorway of Pelez’s studio at 62 Boulevard de Clichy, appearing as though the artist had just encountered this familiar figure on the street. Yet his vacant stare combined with the thin, flat application of paint in a retrained, neutral palette suggests that perhaps this figure represents one of Paris’ most recognizable types—the gamin, or the street urchin—rather than a distinct individual. A favorite trope in visual and literary discourse of the later nineteenth century, the gamin was so thoroughly embedded in the legibility of the modern city that Victor Hugo proclaimed in the 1862 novel, Les Misérables, that “[T]he gamin stands for Paris.”
Pelez’s fascination with naturalistically depicting the pathos and vulnerability of the urban lower classes distinguishes him from his more well-remembered contemporaries such as Jules Bastien-Lepage whose naturalistically depicted the laboring classes in rural, rather than urban, milieus. Some scholars have compared Pelez’s works to contemporaneous images of the urban lower classes by Georges Seurat, Edgar Degas, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, however their stylistic concerns differ considerably. Known widely in his day, this artist working on the fringes of the Parisian avant-garde occupies an incomparable position as the chronicler of the Belle Époque’s other side—its marginalized, its destitute, its down-and-out, and its forgotten. It is for this reason that recent interest has been revived and collected around the spectacular paintings of Fernand Pelez who, in 1901, described each of his works such as Petit Misère as individual pages in the book describing Paris’ misérables.
Monsieur Pelez was the painter of the impoverished. He knew the suburbs and the working-class outskirts; he knew the suffering of the homeless and the destitute. He understood the agony of those forced to live without homes and without bread. All his subjects were taken from everyday life and uncovered a corner of contemporary reality.”
— François Hoffman
This note was written by Alexandra Fraser.
