The recent upsurge in interest in Romantic artists and history painting in the nineteenth century fully justifies the desire to make the public better aware of the work of Eugène Devéria (Paris, 1805-Pau, 1865).
This exhibition, which marks the bicentenary of the painter’s birth, has been facilitated by the opening of private collections and by significant additions to museum collections in recent years.
Eugène Devéria had his hour of glory at the Salon of 1827, where he briefly incarnated the success of the new Romantic school with his painting The Birth of Henry IV. This burst of fame brought him official commissions, especially for the Château of Versailles, and led him into religious painting (in Paris, for Notre Dame de Lorette, in Fougères, and above all in Avignon, with the mural for Notre Dame des Doms).
After that, retiring to Pau where he lived as a fervent Calvinist (after his conversion in 1843), Devéria sank into obscurity, and although he still cultivated the historical genre, he devoted his time to portraits and landscapes.
His reputation took him to Holland and Scotland, where he specialised in portraiture.
Through Eugène Devéria, this exhibition seeks to give visitors a grasp of the melancholic mood of the century and the essence of Romanticism. It presents a hundred works (paintings, drawings and prints), with the emphasis on sketches, in which Devéria’s brilliant, colourful style is at its best.
The artist’s career fits neatly into the four sections of the exhibition:
The Flower of Youth (1824-1827)
A few testimonies to the brilliant intellectual and artistic circles that Eugène Devéria moved in as a young man: youthful portraits, a portrait of General Hugo (Paris, Maison Victor Hugo), and his first historical scenes (The Sentencing of Mary Stuart, 1826, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers).
Four Large Scenes
Starting from preparatory studies, this section traces the development of four large paintings which mark significant events in the artist’s career and bring out the link he established between history and current events:
- The Birth of Henry IV (1827)
- Louis-Philippe I Taking an Oath to Maintain the Charter, 9 August 1830 (1831-1836)
- The Duke of Montpensier Unveiling the Statue of Henri IV in Pau, 27 August 1843 (1845)
- Christopher Columbus Received by Ferdinand and Isabel (1861)
An Unswervingly Romantic Culture (1845-1861)
In the 1840s, Eugène Devéria’s painting (The Death of Jane Seymour, Salon of 1847, A Scene from the Life of Henry VIII, after 1850, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen) was full of literary references to Romantic drama, the novels of Walter Scott or Shakespeare’s plays, but was unaffected by contemporary developments in art.
Anxiety and Consolations
The relatively isolated subject of The Death of Calvin (circa 1850, Musée Jean Calvin, Noyon) marks the change of direction that Devéria’s commitment to Calvinism wrought in his career as a history painter. Evidence of his spirituality (annotated Bibles) and examples of his writing (diary, letters, poems) shed light on an unusual personality.
