Lot n° 330
Estimation :
800 - 1000
EUR
École française, vers 1848
Allegory of the Republic, in the form of a winged genius, naked, draped in purple, brandishing with the right hand a tricolor banner stamped with the motto "Liberty", and placing, with the left hand, a ballot in a ballot box.
Oil on canvas, mounted on cardboard
31 x 22,7 cm.
Handwritten annotation on the back: The universal suffrage / genius of freedom / Etex ?
Interesting testimony of the "Contest of 1848", which aimed to fix a symbolic image of the Republic.
This competition was to allow, on the one hand, the young Second Republic to have a symbolic representation that could be widely disseminated throughout France, and, on the other hand, to affirm its adherence to the egalitarian ideal. It was during a call to artists published on March 18, 1848 in Le Moniteur universel that the competition was launched. The call for artists stipulated that the sketches had to be submitted to the École des Beaux-Arts from April 1 to 5, 1848, that a public exhibition of the sketches would be held from April 5 to 8, and that a jury would choose three sketches that would be reproduced in large format before the final evaluation.
Among the original features of this competition: great freedom of composition, openness to all artists, of all nationalities, without any condition of artistic training, anonymity of the candidatures, election - and not nomination - of the members of the jury.
The artists elected to the jury were: Ingres, Léon Cogniet, Paul Delaroche, Delacroix, Decamps, Tony Robert-Fleury and Schnetz. Other personalities completed the jury: Charles Blanc, Ferdinand Flocon, Alphonse de Lamartine, Félix Pyat, Étienne Arago, and Théophile Thoré.
Not surprisingly, the competition did not achieve the expected results: indifference of the jury, absence of instructions framing the creations, amateurism of the candidates, obsolescence of the allegorical subject, etc. "All selection was refused, so that the good paintings were crushed by the mediocrity and extravagance of many others. The Jury was obliged to proceed by successive elimination: exclusion of the weakest, choice of one hundred and twenty-five sketches then fifty-eight. Among these last ones, none of them could be chosen because Delaroche proposed to retain not three, but twenty sketches from which a large painting would be commissioned, in return for a compensation of five hundred francs, a very small sum for a painting of more than two meters high. This was accepted unanimously." (Chaudonneret, La Figure de la République, le concours de 1848. Paris, 1987, p.28)
After some procrastination, a list of finalists was published including: Hippolyte Flandrin, Henri-Pierre Picou, Félix Fossey, Sébastien-Melchior Cornu, Henri-Joseph-Armand Cambon, Henri-Édouard Massy, Auguste Hesse, JeanBaptiste-Auguste Leloir, Alexandre Hesse, Honoré Daumier, Raymond Balze, Charles Landelle, Alfred-Thompson Gobert, Jean-Auguste Marc, Charles Jalabert, Hippolyte-Dominique Holfeld, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paul-César Gariot, Louis Charles-Auguste Steinheil, Dominique Papéty. An additional list was published, in anticipation of defections, including: Narcisse Diaz de la Pena, Jules-Claude Ziegler, Emile Signol, Adrien Guignet, and Jean-Baptiste Guignet.
Flandrin defected from the competition (and was replaced by Diaz), and Daumier never submitted his final work, so that 19 figures of the Republic were presented to the Jury for the final vote... which was cancelled on October 23, 1848 without a winner being named...
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