Depictions of the boy-hero Viala are rare in art. This striking image, attributed to Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, would seem to owe more to David's visions of the Revolutionary martyr than to later 19th-century realism. But is it really by Prud'hon and, more questionable still, does it really represent the feisty child-hero of Year II?
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, "Death of Viala", Musée des Beaux-arts, Lyon.
Image on Wikimedia: Supplied by user "Rama" as one of a set of accredited photographs from the Musée des Beaux-arts in Lyon.
Paintings department, accession number 1966-13.
Donated by the heirs of Emile Labeyrie in 1966.
Taken on 27th April 2011.
The painting is from the collections of the Musée des Beaux-arts in Lyon. It pops up frequently on the internet, but almost all the images derive from a single photograph on Wikipedia / Wikimedia, taken in April 2011. The photographer, "Rama" kindly sent me an email to confirm that the work is indeed (or was) on display in the museum and that their annotation was taken from the museum label. It is an oil painting; no dimensions are given.
I had some trouble finding further references. The picture is not included in either the museum's online catalogue or in the accessible extract from the Catalogue raisonné for the collection, published in 2014. It is a comparatively recent acquisition, given by the heirs of the politician Émile Labeyrie in 1966, with no earlier provenance available. There are entries on the various commercial sites selling reproductions or digital images, but these add no new facts.
The same is true of references in modern works on masculinity in art:
Germaine Greer in The beautiful boy (2003) refers to the work as "attributed" to Prud'hon. Dominique Fernandez, Le rapt de Ganymède (Grasset, 2014), lists Prud'hon's Death of Viala as dated 1794 and "hors Salons".[Google Books preview])
I finally came across a reference to a relevant article by the curator Madeleine Vincent published in the Bulletin des musées et monuments lyonnais for 1967:
Madeleine Vincent, "Deux oeuvres attribuée à Pierre-Paul Prudhon au musée des beaux-arts, Bull. des musées et monuments lyonnais 1967, p.1-10. 3 figs, 1 plate. Subject: "two works in the museum attributed to Prud'hon, a self-portrait and the a nude considered as "la mort de Viala" of 1794." [Catalogued in Annales de Bourgogne, 1972]
A summary in another listing reads: "An académie by Prud'hon, which has recently entered the musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyons, could be, according to Mlle Madeleine Vincent, a study for a Mort de Viala."
Unfortunately, I do not have access to this article, but we can draw a few preliminary inferences:
- The work is only "attributed to Prud'hon".
- It may be regarded as an "académie", that is a study from life
Nowadays Prud'hon is much admired for his beautiful studio portraits, a "body of stunning figure drawings" (See Rubenstein, 2007). These were essentially private pieces, and not necessarily preliminary studies for finished works. The pose in the Viala portrait is similar to some of these compositions. On the other hand, as an oil painting, it does not fit neatly within this corpus. Arguably, it is less accomplished, particularly the head and facial features.
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| Images from Rubenstein, 2007 |
- There is no certainty it represents Viala
There is (presumably) some prior reference to a "Mort de Viala" of 1794 by Prud'hon. But if so, I have failed to find it.
Most of what is know of Prud'hon's Revolutionary career is summarised in Sylvain Laveissière's study, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, which was published to accompany an exhibition held at the Grand Palais and Metropolitan Museum in 1998:
Prud'hon was born 1758, the son of a stone carver from Cluny in Saône-et-Loire. He studied in Dijon, Paris and Rome, before returning to France in 1787. He was broadly sympathetic towards the ideas of the Revolution and participated actively in the reformed artistic institutions of the capital, but was never closely associated with David and his circle. The idea he was an ardent Jacobin rests only on the anecdote that during the Legislative Assembly he and his friends would listen admiringly to Robespierre's speeches at the Jacobin Club. (See p.157-9) The famous portrait of Saint-Just, also in the Musée des Beaux-arts in Lyon, is no longer attributed to him (p.91).
Prud'hon had a reputation as a reticent and dreamy man.
His Revolutionary output was almost entirely confined to a series of allegorical designs for engravings by Jacques-Louis Copia. His few known projects for monumental paintings, for the Panthéon and the Ministry of Agriculture, were either never realised or have not been preserved. They were again patriotic allegories. In 1794 the Concours de l'an II he presented a project for La Sagesse et la Vérité descendent sur la terre which was finally exhibited the Salon of 1799.
Sylvain Laveissière's book has a detailed chronology which lists Prud'hon's attested works in some detail, but no Viala.
I might yet find a reference....
In the meantime, there is nothing about the picture itself to suggest the identification: no suggestive accoutrements such as accompany David's Bara - and, clearly, this is a grown man. This seems especially odd, as Prud'hon was capable of conceiving such delicious boneless ephebes!
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| Prud'hon, "Union of Love and Friendship", c. 1793, Minneapolis Institute of Art |
References
Sylvain Laveissière, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1998), p.157-59.
Ephraim Rubenstein, "The erotic frigidaire: the académies of Pierre-Paul Prud'hon", article from Drawing Magazine, 2007.
Nicole Levis-Godechot, "Prud'hon Jacobin", Bulletin d'histoire de la Revolution Française; Années 1982-83 (Paris, 1985), pp. 92-94 [On Google Books - snippet view only]
Alfred Sensier, « Le Roman de Prud'hon ». Revue internationale de l'art et de la curiosité, 15 décembre 1869, p. 502-515.
Sensier is the origin of the anedote about Robespierre:
We learn that Prud'hon was an enthusiast for the American war, the reforms of Louis XVI, the Encyclopédistes. On his return from Paris, he and his friends would go to listen to the speakers at the Jacobins or Cordeliers. The family Fauconnier, with whom he lodged, reported that he admired Robespierre's oratory during the Legislative when Robespierre still supported the Constitutional monarchy (p.514).
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