Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de Seine). After an exhibition on the painter held in 1991-1992 at the Avelines Museum, his director, Damien Chantrenne, returned to Henri Regnault (1843-1871), killed during the second battle of Buzenval which took place in part on the territory of Saint-Cloud. The painter owes his celebrity to this premature death as a hero and a career promise that has not been achieved. Time has almost erased his memory: only a few art historians maintain, perhaps more fascinated by his romantic figure than by his talent. It was therefore necessary to reassess life and career, with a constraint: it is impossible to present works of very large format in the museum. However, the most famous picture of Regnault, Execution without judgment under the Moorish kings of Granada (1870), measures just over 3 meters in height without its frame.
It is however by this Execution that the route opens, or rather by a very good quality reproduction flanked by a sketch for the main character in the figure of the executioner. This small oil on canvas was recently acquired by the collectors Corinne and Étienne Brreton, related to the painter’s fiancée, Geneviève Bréton. After this preamble, “A symphony of colors According to Théophile Gautier, the blast that was the death of Regnault is almost the only subject of the first room. This “Charming musician, and, in his spare time, poet”as Auguste Angellier wrote, curious, polyglot, surrounded by friends, described by his biographers in the 1870s and 1880s, is mentioned by documents, photos and his only known painted portrait, executed by Victor Giraud around 1863. The other objects and works on display show how Regnault, Rome Prize, was for the academic world the representative figure of all artists of the war of 1870.
In modernity
What would have become Regnault if he had lived? This is the question that the visitor could ask himself in the rest of the course. His desire for travel, his orientalism, of which Damien Chantrenne says in the catalog that he influenced the whole continuation of the movement, his talent as a portrait painter are documented by works often in the state of sketches, sometimes clumsy but testifying to his virtuosity as a designer and a colorist, his free touch, the modernity that the criticism of his time recognized. Installed in Tangier before his death, he envisaged a journey in India in which his fiancée had committed to accompany him.
If we judge by his portraits of friends or peasants met in Spain, in which he is attentive to the psychology of his models, the figures of fantasy as The Spanish Canaille (1868) or the famous Salomé (1870), kept in the United States and represented here by reproduction, would probably have given way to more authentic works. THE Kader portraityoung groom of the painter in Morocco (1869-1870), or the magnificent wash Standing (1869-1870) of the Musée d’Orsay let him imagine.
