We are living in a “woke” age, a moment when anyone with an informed sense of judgment is obliged to take cover in sleep. I may be wrong, but I thought it to be unlikely that the present age would see an exhibition of Romantic heroes. Admittedly, most of them are so famous that even now, when the past is increasingly forgotten, they need no introduction. Held at Paris’s Musée de la Vie romantique (a Ninth Arrondissement house and garden that once belonged to the Romantic artist Ary Scheffer), the exhibition “Héroïnes Romantiques” features popular heroines whose reputations thrived in a period of dreamy passion and intrigue.1
Despite laws restricting the rights of women in France, such as Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804—the Corsican bandit, like many dictators after him, was eager to confine women to the household—women were prominent as decidedly non-domestic heroines in the period’s art. A glance at the prima-donna roles of contemporary opera and ballet will attest to this.
The exhibition features famous historical figures whose modern reputations were forged by the thinkers and artists of the Romantic era, such as Sappho, Peter Abelard’s beloved Héloise, Joan of Arc, and Mary Stuart. In addition, we see fictional characters such as the Shakespearean heroines and anti-heroines Juliet, Desdemona, and Lady Macbeth. Mary Stuart is something of a hybrid case: we learn from the exhibition that she owed much of her nineteenth-century fame to her appearances in both Schiller’s play Maria Stuart (1800), which inspired Donizetti’s opera, and Sir Walter Scott’s best-seller The Abbot (1820)—a novel barely remembered today. Other favorite heroines of the time were Chateaubriand’s Atala, found in the eponymous novel, and Esmeralda, the gipsy girl rescued by Quasimodo in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. The exhibition tells us that the Romantics loved these female icons and their stories of passion, trial, and sacrifice. Interestingly, although many of these romantic heroines were created or embellished by men, the exhibition has rescued from obscurity several female artists who portrayed the period’s heroines in much the same way (if only in slightly less lascivious terms).
Most of Sappho’s poetry is lost to us, but her name and isle of origin, Lesbos, are linked with female homosexuality. The exhibition opens with Antoine-Jean Gros’s 1801 painting of Sappho jumping off the misty cliff at Leucate into the sea after she was disappointed by the boatman Phaon—perhaps evidence that Sappho was not always a “Sapphist,” as lesbianism was once termed. The exhibition also includes two sculptures by James Pradier (1790–1852), considered in his lifetime to be a leading sculptor. In one of his works, Sappho appears as a delicately clothed young woman with her telltale lyre at her side.
Marie d’Orléans (1813–39), the daughter of King Louis Philippe, was also famous for her sculptures and studied under Ary Scheffer. Her Joan of Arc in Prayer (1837) looks rather like the twentieth-century comic-strip hero Prince Valiant, or perhaps like Vita Sackville-West, who was once allegedly described by Noël Coward as Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper in one. A more sensual heroine beckons in Jean Gigoux’s Death of Cleopatra (1851), which shows the voluptuous and naked queen as she grasps the fatal asp. The caption informs the viewer that, with the nude subject’s approval, Gigoux submitted the painting to the Salon of 1850. Gigoux’s contrast of lighting between the vivid, dark red and her pale, supple body suggests that Cleopatra’s death itself takes a secondary focus to the intense sensuality of her figure.
The exhibition claims that Romanticism considered madness and violence to be part of feminine nature, though again I have a feeling that those elements appeared in contemporary portrayals of men as well. The period indeed witnessed a sensational popularization of female literary figures, who were well adapted to the dramatic scenes the age admired. In one example, in 1827, Félicie de Fauveau, one of the period’s great female artists, painted the seventeenth-century Christina of Sweden (1626–1689) refusing to pardon one of her squires, a painting which also inspired Alexandre Dumas to write his play, Christine—Stockholm, Fontainebleau, and Rome (1830). Medea, who murders her children to spite her lover, their father Jason, was another favorite heroine of the day. It is always rewarding to see anything by Delacroix, and the exhibition includes his sketch before 1838 of Medée furieuse. Marguerite in Goethe’s Faust was another passionate heroine, and in 1846, Ary Scheffer painted her as such as she forlornly holds her dead child.
With the bloody excess of the French Revolution fresh in his mind, in 1830 Ary Scheffer’s brother Henri painted the scene of Charlotte Corday’s arrest in rich colors of red and silvery white, reminiscent of Delacroix. For French Romantics, Corday was well-known as “the angel of assassination” for her murder of Jean-Paul Marat, the Revolution’s radical journalist and martyr credited with starting the movement down the path to Terror. Jacques-Louis David immortalized the murder in the Oldmasters Museum’s Death of Marat (1793).
A room in the exhibition quotes Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856), in which the eponymous heroine is led as much astray by her addiction to reading romantic novels as Don Quixote was by tales of chivalry. Charles de Steuben’s La liseuse (The Reader, 1829) shows a young woman looking up in a state of dreamy amusement from the novel in her hand.
The public of the Romantic period was entranced not only by novels but also by Shakespeare’s plays. Until the beginning of the century, the playwright was all but unknown in France, even if Voltaire, after a visit to England, had written about Shakespeare’s genius. Delacroix, praised as a “son of Shakespeare,” loved painting scenes from his tragedies, as did other painters from the period. As the exhibition’s paintings suggest, Shakespeare’s Othello was a frequent focus. Othello had that element of exotic orientalism mixed with danger that fascinated the period. To evince this feeling, the exhibition displays Delacroix’s painting (ca. 1852) of Desdemona being scolded by her father, a senator of Venice, for her choice of a husband. The father’s robes are of a vibrant Rubenesque red that befits his station as opposed to his daughter’s somber dress of dark gray with a white border. We also see Jules-Robert Auguste’s impressionist Othello and Desdemona, in which the enormous Othello crushes the delicate Desdemona in his arms, just as he does in the play. Théodore Chassériau portrayed the strangled Desdemona in her bed with a weeping Othello kneeling before her lifeless body in a series of lithographs. Viewers will then notice a series of other works inspired by Shakespearean heroines and anti-heroines. The famous French actress Rachel brilliantly played Lady Macbeth, inspiring Charles-Louis Müller to portray her madness with her hair flying about her in an 1849 painting. Around 1856, Delacroix depicted Romeo and a bare-breasted Juliet at the tomb of the Capulets. As the exhibition’s poster, Léopold Burthe’s 1851 painting Ophélia shows the girl of the same name drowned in a river with one breast exposed. Rimbaud later wrote a great poem on the painting, and the work is pleasant even if Ophélia’s serene countenance belies the sense of torment she felt before her drowning.
Delacroix was a great friend of the novelist George Sand (Auorore Dupin’s male pen name). In 1852, he painted the last scene from the novelist’s Leila. Many photographs of George Sand and her children, watercolors she painted, and much of her jewelry reside in the permanent collections of the Musée de la Vie romantique, making her as much of a presence in this museum as Ary Scheffer. The exhibition ends with a look at the ballet stars of the day, such as Carlotta Grisi, Marie Taglioni, and Fanny Eisler, all of whom delighted theatergoers in their gauzy gowns. “Héroïnes Romantiques” shows just how much the Romantic age remains with us and influences our present culture—however besieged it may now seem to be.