Hatching girl by Georges Pavis

This illustration appeared in saucy French magazine La Vie Parisienne in 1926.  It was the work of Georges Pavis (1886-1977) who sold his first illustrations at the age of nine.  He studied at l'École des beaux-arts but was drafted into the army during the Great War, where he was badly injured at Verdun.  After the war he provided illustrations for all the main French magazines, as well as books.

The Battle of Waterloo: The British Squares Receiving the Charge of the French Cuirassiers by Félix Philippoteaux

This painting is by Felix Philippoteaux (1815-1884) s called 'The Battle of Waterloo: The British Squares Receiving the Charge of the French Cuirassiers'. I had a postcard of this when I was a boy, which my father bought me on a visit to Apsley House (where it is displayed) in about 1971. I loved it, of course, because it showed those Airfix Napoleonic favourites; Cuirassiers and Highlanders. Philippoteaux was only born in 1815 and this painting wasn't completed until 1874, many years after the battle of which it captures the quintessence.

Philippoteaux collaborated with his son Paul on a vast (more than a hundred yards long) cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg . Since lost, several more copies were made including the one in the Gettysburg visitors centre

After the Bath by Pierre Auguste Renoir

This is, quite possibly, my favourite painting of all time or, at the very least, in the top three (with Boucher's Miss Marie-Louise O'Murphy and Alma-Tadema's In the Tepidarium).  I first saw it, at the age of eleven, in my father's copy of  The Female Nude in European Painting (1957) by the French art critic and novelist Jean-Louis Vaudoyer (1883-1963).  This is a brilliantly selected survey from prehistory to Picasso. The largely black and white, but occasionally glorious colour, illustrations include some of my favourite paintings to this day. 

Not least of these, is the cover illustration of Renoir's After the Bath (1888). I still have this book in my library. It was this book that had me drawing my first non military figures, as I copied many of the pictures inside. It led to a lifelong interest in drawing and painting (and, indeed, ladies) and, five years after discovering it, I first combined the two, thanks to a brave and friendly girl from archery club, who I had softened up by looking at this book with her!

Sleeping Bather by Théodore Chassériau

 (1850)

Today's wallpaper is  by Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856) and is a remarkably frank nude portrait for the time. It was a body that the artist knew well, however, as she was his lover, Alice Ozy (1820-1893), born Julie Justine Pilloy, the daughter of a Parisian jeweller. Julie worked as an embroideress in Paris and then Lyon.  Returning to Paris, the sixteen year old Julie caught the eye of an actor at a dance hall in Montparnasse. He suggested she become an actress (he suggested several other things to her as well) and got her some small roles. She got her first real role in vaudeville at the age of seventeen and took the stage name Alice Ozy (based on her mother's maiden name). For the next five years her roles and acclaim increased until by 1845, she was one of the best regarded young actresses in Paris.With this fame came wealthy male admirers.  Like many actresses of the time she became a courtesan, being paid by wealthy men for ' companionship'. One of her lovers left her a large legacy when she was still young, which she invested wisely.  In 1843 she started a relationship with the novelist and poet Theophile Gautier and in short order also 'entertained' the writer Nestor Roqueplan, the Emperor Napoleon's son, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III of France) as well as Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale, the son of the then King of France, Louis-Philippe. She was never short of suitors and later had an affair with Charles Hugo, the son of the novelist Victor Hugo.  Charles, fed up with Alice's other lovers asked his father what he should do about the situation, whereupon Victor bombarded her with erotic poems and took her as his (additional) mistress instead, much to his son's annoyance. All this ended in 1848, when she fled the revolution in Paris for London.

Portrait of Alice Ozy (1848) by Chassériau

When she returned to Paris, later in 1848, she started a two year, tempestuous relationship with the painter of this picture Théodore Chassériau.  Their relationship ended when she asked him for one of his paintings which he intended for his family. He refused but she insisted and eventually, in order to end the arguments, he agreed to give it to her (so to speak). It just happened that he was enjoying breakfast with Alice at her apartment when the painting arrived by carriage from his studio. In a fit of remorse at giving the painting to Alice, he slashed it to ribbons in front of her and walked out on her for good.  She retired from the stage in 1855 and reverted to her birth name of Julie Pilloy. using her friends in the banking world to increase her fortune. She bought a house outside Paris and kept a lavish apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann.

Time Slaying Love

Another lover of Ozy's was the artist Gustave Doré, who designed a special clock for Ozy's apartment in Paris, where it was displayed in the entrance hall. Called Time Slaying Love it shows Time slaying cherubs with his spear. The message from Ozy was that any relationship with her was going to be fleeting, as time is the enemy of love (how very true). Julie Justine Pilloy remained unmarried (although far from without male companionship) and died, a wealthy woman, in her apartment on March 3rd 1892, at the age of 72.  Chassériau died many years before this, at the age of 37 after years of ill health

Harem nude by Georges Antoine Rochegrosse

Harem nude (c. 1910)

Orientalist inspiration in today's wallpaper of a harem nude by Georges Antoine Rochegrosse  (1859-1938), one of a number of harem style nudes he produced.  There is an Algerian link to Rochegrosse, as well, as he spent his winters there and utilised  source material from there for many of his paintings.

Rochegrosse also produced this wonderfully spirited painting called The Heroes of Marathon, which certainly makes up in energy what it lacks in accurate phalanx depiction.

Les Filles d'Atlas by Paul Alexandre Alfred Le Roy

Les Filles d'Atlas

Today's wallpaper is this splendid painting by the French painter Paul Alexandre Alfred Le Roy (1860-1942).  Brought up in Russia, Le Roy moved to Paris when he was seventeen.  Like many orientalist painters of the time, he travelled to North Africa and Turkey and collected items for use in his paintings.  The title of the painting has two meanings, in that these huntresses are depicted in the Atlas mountains, which Le Roy painted on many occasions but they are also supposed to represent some of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of the titan Atlas, who were eventually transformed into stars by Zeus, to keep their father company as he supported the heavens on his shoulders.  He has depicted them in locally inspired North African tribal cloth rather than the more usual classical approach.

The Reading Girl by Théodore Roussel

The Reading Girl (1886), Roussel

Today's wallpaper demonstrates one of the easiest things to get a model to do, while she endures the tedious process of being captured on paper or canvas, which is to let her read a book. The fact that she is concentrating on a book also distances her from the viewer. There is no opportunity to engage the viewer directly, as her gaze is elsewhere. It adds a voyeuristic quality to the picture. This painting, by French born, but London based, artist Théodore Roussel, is a marvellous composition. Irish painter William Orpen called it the finest nude painting of the time, although its realism shocked many due to its lack of classical justification for the nudity.  The art critic of The Specator wrote:."Our imagination fails to conceive any adequate reason for a picture of this sort. It is realism of the worst kind, the artist’s eye seeing only the vulgar outside of his model, and reproducing that callously and brutally. No human being, we should imagine, could take any pleasure in such a picture as this; it is a degradation of Art."  It's actually a wonderful painting with Hetty's pale body glowing against the almost black background. Only the kimono (a reflection of Roussel's interest in Japanese art) gives any colour to the painting.  Roussel's friend Whistler called it "an extraordinary picture" ,

Hetty Pettigrew (1889) by Sambourne

The model in this painting is nineteen year old Hetty (also variously known as Bessie, Harriet or Nettie) Pettigrew (1867-1953) who. with her sisters Lily (b. 1870 and Rose (b. 1872), modelled for Whistler, Millais, Godward, Poynter. Leighton, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones and others. Hetty was born in Portsmouth but the family were originally from the West Country. Millais said that the sisters were gypsies (although they themselves claimed aristocratic antecedents) and her sister Rose described Hetty as having a "cruel wit". They were generally considered, by those who painted them, as a bit of a handful. The  penniless Pettigrew sisters came to London in 1884 and their artist brother suggested they could make a living as models. He was right and they became the most sought after models in London, with painters offering them bribes to pose for them instead of other artists. The Pettigrew sisters commanded fees for modelling of no less than half a guinea a day, about twice what a housemaid would earn in a week.  Hetty became Roussel's mistress and bore him a child in 1900.  When Roussel's wife died in 1914, Hetty was shattered when Roussel married another woman and she never posed for him again.  Hetty was photographed, at the age of 23, by Punch illustrator and amateur photographer, Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910)  (Lord Snowdon's great-grandfather and furniture designer Viscount Linley's great-great-grandfather) and the photograph shows how well Roussel caught her features.

Nude lying on a couch by Gustave Caillebotte

Nude lying on a couch (1873)

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Today's wallpaper is by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894).  Caillebotte qualified as a lawyer and also an engineer but was drafted into the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine in the Franco-Prussian War. It was only afterwards that he began to study art seriously and he first exhibited in the second Impressionists exhibition in 1876. Although, as can be seen here, many of his paintings showed a tighter realism than his peers. Caillebotte's brother died at a young age and the artist (rightly) thought that he would not live into old age, so he wrote a detailed will leaving his collection of his and other impressionist paintings (Renoir was his executor) to the French State. Impressionism still wasn't really accepted in Paris by the authorities and they didn't want them balthough an exhibition of part of Caillbotte's collection, after his death at the age of 48, was the first show of impressionist paintings held in a public venue, at the Palais de Luxembourg.  More than thirty years later, the French government, having changed their mind about impressionism, tried to grab the collection but the Caillebotte family saw them off and many of the paintings in the collection were bought by Albert Barnes and taken into his Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, where the Legatus went to see them a few years ago.

This is an uncompromisingly realistic nude for 1873 and has none of the usual themes that artists used to justify painting naked ladies at the time; such as bathers or classical subjects.  As a result, it has a timeless quality which makes it look more modern than its 145 year old age.

Venus by Henri-Pierre Picou

Hereis  a rather languid rendition of Venus by French Painter Henri-Pierre Picou (1824-1895).  Picou came rather later to classical and mythological subjects, so this was probably painted in the 1870s or 1880s. He was a great friend of Jean-Léon Gérôme and, although largely forgotten today, he was probably the most fashionable French painter of the eighteen fifties and sixties.  This depiction of Venus in her shell is unusual compared with the more usual, Botticelli style, upright pose.  Painted from this angle it is much more redolent of the vulva, which it symbolised in ancient times (hence why Venus was born from one).  I don't like much seafood but I do enjoy a nice plump scallop, as did Picou, obviously.

September Morn by Paul Émile Chabas

September Morn (1912)

This picture was painted by French artist Paul Émile Chabas (1869-1937) who was born in Nantes and trained under William-Adolphe Bouguereau.  He first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1890 and was awarded a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. Although he painted many portraits, he was best known for his pictures of women and girls bathing in lakes and pools.  Chabas took three years, working during the summers, to finish his most famous painting, September Morn.  The setting was Lake Annecy, in the mountains of Savoie and Chabas painted the background on location.  He finished the painting one morning in September 1912, hence the name. Who the model for the painting was has never been clear and several women claimed to be the subject.  In is possible the figure is actually based on two girls; one for the body and another for the head and it is likely that she was drawn in the studio not on location.

Chabas

The painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1912 where it won the Medaille d’Honneur, to critical acclaim. What happened next, however, was completely unprecedented and led to the picture playing a significant role in an early American censorship battle. In those days, popular paintings were often reproduced as prints. In March 1913 one of these reproductions of September Morn was being displayed in the window of Fred Jackson’s Art Store in Chicago.  A passing policeman saw it, decided it was obscene, and ordered Jackson to remove the picture from his window. This he did but soon put it back.  Spotting this, the police returned, bought a copy of the picture and presented it to the Mayor, Carter Harrison Jr.   Harrison was a reformer and in 1911 had established the Chicago Vice Commission.

Mayor Harrison and his wife in 1913 

Mayor Harrison agreed that the picture violated the municipal code, which banned the exhibit of “any lewd picture or other thing whatever of an immoral or scandalous nature.”  They prosecuted Jackson, much to the outrage of the local artistic community. Despite testimony from local worthies that the picture was immoral and shouldn’t be viewed by children under fourteen the jury, after only thirty minutes deliberation, unanimously acquitted Jackson who immediately presented each juror with a copy of the painting, which they all gratefully received. This decision led to numerous shops displaying the picture so that the city then had to specifically forbid the display of “nude pictures in any window, except at art or educational exhibitions.”  Needless to say this just increased interest in the painting. The city appealed but in May 1914 the First District Appelate Court ruled that the picture was not indecent, although they made cutting comments regarding its exploitation. Only two months after the initial Chicago controversy, in May 1913, a similar furore took place in New York. Tipped off, it is said, by a school teacher, Anthony Comstock, the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice entered the Braun & Co art dealers’ showroom where September Morn was on display in the window. He ordered the removal of the picture. James Kelly the salesman on duty, informed Comstock that the picture was “the famous September Morning”.  Kelly allegedly replied that “There’s too little morning and too much maid.”  Kelly’s boss then later ordered the picture back into the window where it remained for five days, whilst the gallery expected the return of Comstock any day. In the end Braun & Co took the picture down themselves as the crowds it was drawing were interfering with normal customers and they'd sold all their prints anyway. The manager of the gallery wrote an incensed letter to the New York Times and arguments raged about the picture all over America.  In December 1914 the students of a college in Ohio publicly burnt copies of the picture, along with other erotic literature and other questionable (by their standards) pictures.

Ann Pennington 

All of this just generated huge publicity for the picture. Millions of prints (some estimate as many as seven million) were sold and it was reproduced on postcards, bottle openers, cigar bands, umbrellas, watch fobs, chocolate boxes and many others. A song was written about it, there was an onstage recreation of it in the Ziegfield Follies (by the petite, 4’10”dancer Ann Pennington) and it was even the subject of a Broadway musical. It is also generally believed to have been the first nude picture on a calendar to go on sale.  Chabas himself never made any money from all these reproductions, although he did sell the original to a Russian collector, Leon Mantacheff, for the not inconsiderable sum of $10,000. It is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York because the Philadelphia Museum of Art had turned the picture down because it had “no significance”.

The Wave and the Pearl by Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry

The Wave and the Pearl (1862)

This glowing nude is by French painter Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry (1828-1886) who is largely forgotten today but, at the time, this picture was regarded as one of the greatest nudes of the nineteenth century.  Most of his best known works were murals in Paris but he did a number of reclining nudes like this.  

A Young Girl Sleeping by Jean-Honoré Fragonard

This is A Young Girl Sleeping by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) or Une jeune Italienne à demi-nue, couchée volupteusement sur un lit de repos, où elle s'endormie as it was described when sold in 1776 for a thousand livres (the equivalent of about £10,000 based on the value of gold then).  This was an early nude by Fragonard, painted when he was in his most Boucheresque phase during his first trip to Italy from 1756 to 1761, so he would have been in his twenties at the time.  In fact, it was the only nude he painted in this period but is a forerunner of the tastefully erotic work he would do later in life.

The picture disappeared from the record at the end of the eighteenth century and reappeared in 2014 when it was put up for auction.  Due to a piece of luck it could be positively identified, as someone, at the original 1766 auction had made a quick sketch of the painting in their catalogue and this had been preserved in the Bibliothèque National.  It was sold in 2014 for the comparatively bargain price pf $395.000.

The Nymphaeum by William Adolphe Bouguereau

The Nymphaeum (1878)

This painting offers us no less than thirteen ladies by French artist William Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905). Painted for the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris it is really an exercise in Bouguereau showing off how well he can paint skin, as his nymphs cavort in a sunlit grove.  The painting hangs in a gallery in Stockton, California, just south of Sacramento and I was lucky enough to see it when I was visiting the Governor of California's office around ten years ago.

Marie-Louise O'Murphy by François Boucher

Marie-Louise O'Murphy (1752)

This is probably my favourite painting of all time: Mary-Louise O'Murphy de Boisfaily by François Boucher (1703-1760).  A picture I fell in love with when I was about eleven (at the same time that I noticed that Carol, Cathy and Heather in my class were really pretty).  She was the fifth daughter of an army officer of Irish extraction, Daniel O'Murphy de Boisfaily.  She was born in Rouen on October 21st 1737. After her father died her mother took her to Paris where the widow traded in second hand clothes whilst finding work for her daughters. Mary-Louise became a dancer at L'Opera and a model. Casanova knew her (she is mentioned in his diaries) and she may have been his mistress, briefly. Casanova certainly introduced her to Boucher who painted this picture of her in 1752 and also had an affair with her (33 year age difference not withstanding). It has been argued that the picture was produced as a direct invitation to Louis XV; demonstrating that she was available to be his mistress. Rather like leaving a photographic postcard of a girl in a phone box outside a Park Lane hotel. There was no issue about presenting a fourteen year old girl as a sexual object in France at the time. The age of consent was, after all, ten during this period and girls could get legally married at twelve.  

Original life sketch of Marie Louise

Louis XV knew a fine piece when he saw it (he liked the painting too) and she quickly became one of his second tier mistresses and stayed so for two years. Louis had an official mistress, of course, Madame de Pompadour, who may have been happy at first for the king to entertain this plump little distraction as she was increasingly exhausted by Louis voracious sexual demands. Mary-Louise bore the king an illegitimate daughter, Agathe Louise de Saint-Antoine (1754-1774), but she tried to oust Madame de Pompadour from top mistress spot and was soon kicked out of the court and married off to Comte de Beaufranchet, who must have been very cheered by this development, as Mary-Louise was still only 17. He didn't get to enjoy her for very long, though, as he was killed at the Battle of Rossbach in 1757, where Frederick the Great smashed a combined Franco-Austrian army. Mary-Louise subsequently had two more husbands, including one who was thirty years younger than her who she married at the age of 61! Although she was imprisoned for a time during the French Revolution she survived The Terror and died in 1814 at the age of 77. The painting now hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. I was lucky enough to see it displayed in an exhibition in Berlin,some years ago (and purchased a very splendid mouse mat of the picture which is too precious to use). It is a comparatively small picture: about 24" by 29" and was just the sort of sized picture Boucher would turn out for the cabinets of his wealthy gentleman collectors.

Boucher also painted another version of the painting, which is in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, but it doesn't quite have the plump pliancy of the original.  I also saw this one in the Berlin exhibition. 

Boucher (1703-1770) was a prolific artist, producing over 10,000 drawings during his life, and at the time was criticised for churning out paintings for the money. A more telling criticism came from the philosopher Diderot who accused Boucher of "prostituting his own wife" as he had her pose for erotic pictures which he sold to collectors. This led to increasing notoriety and his art was criticised more and more towards the end of his life, as neo-classicism ousted his frothy, Rococo style.

Salammbô by Henri Adrien Tanoux

Salammbô (1921) by Henri Adrien Tanoux

Today's wallpaper distraction is Salammbô by Henri Adrien Tanoux.  Salammbô is the heroine of a novel by Flaubert set after the First Punic War and, amazingly for someone as non-literary as me, I have actually read it.  Tanoux (1865-1923) was a later orientalist painter producing many pictures of sumptuous harem girls at the beginning of the twentieth century when the genre was already becoming unfashionable.  Forgotten for many years, his pictures are becoming collectible again and go for upwards of $75.000.

Dans le patio by by François-Maurice Roganeau

Dans le patio (circa 1905)

This picture is from a French postcard with an illustration by François-Maurice Roganeau (1883-1973).  He studied in his home town of Bordeaux but was a good enough painter to win the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome in 1906, which gave the winner a paid year to study in the Italian capital. He was director of l'École des beaux-arts de Bordeaux from 1929 until 1958 and lived to be ninety years old.  Proving, once again, that painting naked ladies leads to long life (unless you are Modigliani).