Society Portraits
At the Salon of 1869, Carolus-Duran exhibited Portrait of Mrs *** or Lady with a Glove, a portrait of his wife which achieved great success and was awarded a highly coveted medal which enabled the prizewinner never again to have to submit their work to the jury. All the characteristics of Carolus-Duran's future work as a painter of female portraits are united in this masterpiece. This was the beginning of a prosperous period for the artist. Carolus-Duran was instantly established as a portrait painter, but in the richest and noblest sense of the term: he developed his palette subtly and with imagination. Théodore Duret said of him that "M. Durant's system is to bring out the dominant note from a model, and stress this note in such a way as to accentuate to the extreme the appearance he wishes to portray. Thus nothing avoided, softened, skilfully concealed. Everything is clear-cut, absolute, frank, to the point of brutality; all is deliberate, and the impression emerging from this virile art is a singular one of vitality and power." That is doubtless the most "modern" aspect of Carolus' work.
Carolus-Duran himself said of the subject: Painting is not an art of imitation, it is an art of interpretation. It is what you feel about something that must you must show, not the exact thing itself. That is what gives works their personality and distinctiveness, but above all: "Saying the most possible with the least possible, in other words seek what is characteristic and show only that." It was following this success that Carolus became a renowned and sought-after portrait painter.
In 1870, Carolus was called up into the National Guard during the Siege of Paris. Badly affected by this period, he went into exile the following year and, in Lille, obtained a passport for Belgium where he lived until the end of the year. During this period he painted numerous portraits of people of distinction in Brussels. The portrait of Mme Sainctelette, exhibited at the 1872 Salon, is a good example, owing more to Ingres-type models than Spanish influence. During this same era, he painted the Portrait of the Countess Ratazzi, née Maria-Laetitia Bonaparte-Wyse, a full-length portrait that is a model of the genre in the magnificence of the details revealing the social position of the Countess Ratazzi. In a more discreet style, he painted the wife of a leading citizen of Ghent, Madame Neyt. This head-and-shoulder portrait is very close to those painted in Brussels for a middle-class clientele desirous of possessing a work by the artist so renowned in Paris.
Primarily a painter of society ladies, Carolus-Duran also painted children, as can be seen in the Portrait of Princess Marguerite de Broglie and her Cousin Robert, and male personalities such as Augustus Coë Gurnee.
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