Page 70 - Revolution Republique Empire Restauration

as much as he deeply admired Staël, he recognised
that her appeal was not rooted in the purely physical.3
Soon after the picture was completed, the prince
gave it to his erstwhile love, Juliette Récamier in
exchange for another work by Gérard. It was
Madame Récamier, Staël’s closest female friend,
who subsequently donated the picture to the muse-
um in Lyon.

The version of Corinne au Cap Misène, here exhibit-
ed, was included in the Salon of 1822, where it is
noted as ‘(M. d R.)’. However,Thiers’ appropriate, if
somewhat exhaustive, romantic discussion of this
picture is accompanied by an illustration of a litho-
graph after the Lyon version.4 This confusion prob-
ably arose out of the fact that Gerard could not
Fig. 1 deliver the picture in time for the vernissage (a point
which Thiers himself noted5) and in compiling his
critique of the 1822 Salon Thiers subsequently con-
fused this version for the larger canvas with which
he was already familiar. Unfortunately, Thiers’ for-
mal analysis of Corinne au Cap Misène does not extend
to a discussion of individual figures, so he made no
mention of the seated figure in the left foreground,
which, apart from the obvious shift in scale, is the
principal difference between the present canvas and
the picture in Lyon. Gerard took his composition
from an early scene in Staël’s epic and included most
of the novel’s characters, adroitly combining his skill
as a portraitist with his ambitious imagination for
subject painting to capture the drama, sensuality
and emotional complexity of de Staël’s novel. Like
the larger version in Lyon, this version was also
commissioned as memorial tribute to one of the

Fig. 2

3. In a letter sent from Berlin dated 6 April, 1819, the Prince wrote: ‘En vous térmoigant ma reconnaissance pour cette complaisance, je soumetterai à votre juge-
ment s’il ne serait pas advantageux de répresenter Corinne sous les traits embellis de Madame de Staël, et de choisir le moment de son triomphe du Capitole, où celui ou elle
se trouve sur le cap Misène, sans vouloir cependent en rien vous gêner dans la composition de cet ouvrage.’ See Baron H.-Alexandre Gérard and A.Viollet-Le-Duc,
Correspondance des François Gérard, peintre d’histoire, avec les artistes et les personnages célèbres de son temps, Paris, 1867, pp.111-113.

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