Gustave Boulanger | Academic painter

Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger (1824-1888) was a French figure painter, Academic artist and teacher known for his Classical and Orientalist subjects.

Boulanger was born in Paris in 1824.

He never knew his father, and when his mother's death left him orphaned at the age of fourteen, he became the ward of his uncle, Constant Desbrosses, who in 1840 sent him to study first under the history painter Pierre-Jules Jollivet and then at the atelier of Paul Delaroche, where Boulanger met and befriended his fellow student Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Boulanger and Gérome would become leading lights of the Néo-Grec movement in French art, which revisited the fascination of previous generations for the Classical world, but brought to its austere subject matter subversive touches of whimsy, sensualit and eroticism.

"When they appear on the contemporary art scene, the Néo-Grecs will be defended as rejuvenators of the Classical tradition by some, condemned as gravediggers of history painting by others…they rarely give an orthodox image of Antiquity, some, like Gérôme, Boulanger and Hamon, not hesitating to choose licentious subjects, to parody mythological characters, or to invent very personal allegories of Antiquity".

In 1845, Boulanger was sent by his uncle to Algeria to tend to Desbrosses's business interests there. Boulanger was fascinated by all he saw, and what was planned as a two-month stay turned to eight, until Desbrosses threatened to cut off his funds.

Boulanger brought back a large number of sketches which he used for his first Orientalist paintings. (This was the first of at least three trips to North Africa, including one in 1872 with Gérôme).

In 1848 and 1849, he shared communal living and working quarters with other artists of the Néo-Grec movement at the Chalet, 27 rue de Fleurus.

The group also gathered at the atelier of Gérôme on rue de Sevres.

Boulanger turned his efforts to winning the Prix de Rome, and with it, a scholarship to the Académie de France à Rome.

In 1848, he obtained second place with Saint Pierre chez Marie, and the next year he won the Grand Prix with Ulysse reconnu par Euryclée and departed for Rome, where he would remain until 1855.

His education and research included study at the excavations of Pompeii. He also traveled to Greece.

Each year, the students at Rome sent back to the Academy in Paris a painting to demonstrate their progress, and for public exhibition; Boulanger's works repeatedly disappointed the Academy and scandalized critics, beginning with the first, Phryné, in 1850. Wrote one reviewer:

"M. Boulanger, a first year pensionnaire, spent a lot of patience to paint with great finesse…a fat naked woman with red hair and slanted blue eyes, seated on rags of all colors and a scrap of cushion on which is engraved in Greek letters her name: Phryné".

To take on this marvelous beauty who inspired Praxiteles' masterpiece and the famous Venus of Apelles, an artist must impose on himself the most severe purity of design, the utmost simplicity of line, the calm splendor of beauty. M. Boulanger's Phryné is far from responding to this program.

In 1856, when his studies at Rome were complete, Boulanger took a second trip to North Africa, and then returned to Paris.

Boulanger moved into his own atelier at rue de La Rochefoucauld, 64, but continued to meet and socialize with the other Néo-Grecs.

He became one of Jean-Léon Gérôme's closest friends; after 1863, Gérôme regularly entrusted him with the management of his studio at the École des Beaux-Arts during his travels in the East.

Teacher and advocate of Academic art

Boulanger was an influential teacher with a long list of students.

At the prestigious Académie Julian, Boulanger, unlike many instructors, accepted both male and female students.

Alice De Wolf Kellogg remembered Boulanger as her favorite teacher, writing, "His instruction was the simplest - most broad - most rousing…that I ever received".

When Boulanger was inducted as a member of the Institut de France in 1882, he joined the faculty of the Beaux-Arts de Paris (more formally known as the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts) and in his final years was both a teacher and an ardent champion of Academic art and its traditions and methods.

After joining the faculty he delivered and published two eloquent speeches.

The first was Notice sur M. Lehmann in 1883, an encomium to the recently deceased Henri Lehmann, whom Boulanger saw as an exemplar of the best artistic virtues.

The second speech was À nos élèves (To Our Students) delivered in 1885, in which Boulanger attacked what he saw as a decadent, vain striving for novelty in the arts.

"We see this so-called novelty appear from year to year under pretentious and ill-justified names such as naturalism, impressionism, luminism, intentionism, tachisme - to use the slang with which they claim to glorify impotence and laziness".

He went on to deliver a paean to the accomplishments of French art, praising the rigorous standards passed from masters to students that had made Paris the art capital of the world. He quoted Claudius Popelin: "Art must be a chain; it is when it breaks that there is decadence".

In a letter to Eugéne Montrosier dated 17 July 1888, Boulanger wrote: "I fight Modernity to the utmost when it manifests itself in the clownish pranksters who have elevated all their impotence and all their laziness to the state of principles. But, these people are still very few in number…There are, beside them, a lot of young men who have talent that I really appreciate. Now, the rowdy Modernity of which you speak, believe me, has no future; it will pass as I have seen so many others pass, of which nothing remains after a few years".

Montrosier in an obituary wrote: "Gustave Boulanger, beneath his peaceful exterior, hid an iron will and a wrestler's temperament. He was sometimes wrong; he did not want to go with his century and lend himself to the changes that French art had to undergo, but he resisted in good faith and fought with conviction". | Source: © Wikipedia