The Swiss teacher of the Impressionists
Swiss painter Charles Gleyre (1806-1874), from Chevilly in the canton of Vaud, was an illustrious figure in the 19th century. Painters such as Albert Anker und Auguste Renoir studied at his Paris studio. Gleyre’s own works fused influences from Romanticism and Impressionism.
Barbara Basting
Barbara Basting worked as a cultural editor and currently heads the visual arts division in the City of Zurich’s Culture Department.
The poet and dandy Lord Byron invented Manfred in 1817 as the eponymous subject of his dramatic poem. Today this poem seems rather bizarre: it starts with Manfred communicating with spirits from whom he requests the gift of forgetfulness. When that doesn’t work, he has a breakdown. The story takes an unusual turn when he wakes up the next day on the summit of the Jungfrau from where he wants to jump to his death. A chamois hunter persuades him not to at the last minute. Following an episode in which Manfred discovers the reasons behind the silence of the spirits, he returns to the Jungfrau. He summons the spirits again, again to no avail.
This is one of the scenes painted by Charles Gleyre.
Of course Gleyre only saw the Jungfrau from a distance, if at all. Even Lord Byron would at most only have heard of the mountain while visiting Switzerland in the summer of 1816, following the first ascent of the Jungfrau in 1811.
Gleyre’s showpiece is one of his early works dating from around 1825. He only really came to prominence much later, starting with the large landscape format ‘The Evening’.
The painting with the fairytale boat in the twilight carrying muses going about their business dressed in the style of antiquity, while a wistful old man looks on pensively from the side, hit a nerve. It projected the malaise of the time coined in the phrase ‘mal du siècle’, as recognised by poets of the day, Alfred de Musset for example. It covered an entire generation during what was known as the July monarchy, i.e. the reign of King Louis Philippe. This generation saw no prospects for themselves, making them yearn for ideals often rooted in ancient antiquity. The Napoleonic wars had been lost, the bourgeois July revolution had failed, conservative forces remained in power. Gleyre’s work was immediately interpreted as a portrayal of Balzac’s famous novel ‘Illusions perdues’ (Lost illusions) and bought by the Louvre.
Like many of his colleagues, he then travelled to Italy to fill his sketchbooks. However, he had trouble financing the years he spent in Rome and Venice from 1828. As a Swiss national he was ineligible for much sought-after grants, such as the ‘Prix de Rome’ awarded by the French for a stay in Villa Medici in Rome. Fortunately for him, the painter Horace Vernet, who was well disposed towards Gleyre and Director at the Villa Medici, introduced Gleyre to Boston industrialist John Lowell. He was looking for an illustrator and watercolourist to accompany him on a journey eastward starting in 1834 and going, among other places, to Egypt via Greece and ending up in India. Before the invention of photography, people would use art to keep visual records of their travels.
Lowell and Gleyre parted ways in Egypt due to differences, particularly as they were both struggling with the heat and had contracted infections. Nonetheless, Gleyre still painted some impressive watercolours, which also included some of the locals near the monuments dating from the time of the Pharaohs.
At the major Gleyre exhibition in the Musée d'Orsay Paris in 2016, Swiss art historian Michel Thévoz saw the painting ‘The Evening’ as an early manifestation of the essence of Gleyre’s artistic stance shaped by self-doubt. The melancholy old man to the side is an embodiment of the artist who struggles with the neoclassical academy style. Although unable to distance himself from it, Gleyre must have felt how sterile and flat it was. This recognition pushed the artist into the questionable role of theatre decorator. He provided the most reliable props to make outdated stories appeal to a contemporary audience.
According to this latest interpretation, the artist was fixated on past artistic ideals. That blinded him to the growing uncertainty and nervousness in society due to burgeoning industrialisation and modernisation. It is indeed true that Gleyre was not a painter of modern life or ‘peintre de la vie moderne’, as he was presented by poet Charles Baudelaire who held him up as a role model in his famous essay collection of 1863. In any case artists like Gleyre who knew how to inject life into slowly stultifying aesthetics, were very popular with the public who tended to favour, unlike modernists of similar ilk to Baudelaire, familiar techniques over the potential for disruption caused by breaking new ground.
Gleyre was not immediately able to follow up on the Parisian success of ‘The Evening’ due to an eye infection he had contracted in Egypt, which forced him to work slowly. Nonetheless, his reputation spread to Lausanne where he was hired for public mandates. Gleyre’s first job was to paint an episode from the 18th century, the execution of the seditious Major Davel in the struggle by Vaud to gain independence from Bern. The work was completed in 1850 and warmly received. However, it was almost destroyed in 1980 by an act of vandalism at Lausanne art museum and has not been restored.
Gleyre enjoyed a good reputation as a teacher, not least due to his syllabus where he started by prioritising drawing, an art in which he was extremely proficient. In return he only charged a modest fee, despite often being short of funds himself. He was also artistically magnanimous in that he did not steer his students towards any particular style. That is how he was able to count different characters including Albert Anker and Auguste Renoir, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alfred Sisley, James Whistler and Frédéric Bazille among the over 500 artists who passed through his studio.
