Prestigious Painting in the Style of the Times
Carolus-Duran, unlike a number of his contemporaries who directed their careers towards decorating the public and religious buildings favoured by the Third Republic, only rarely tackled large format historical or decorative paintings. However, in 1875 he received a commission for a ceiling in the Palais du Luxembourg, a Triumph of Marie de Medicis. Moreover he was involved in decorating the Pantheon, painting a Life of Saint Louis on the walls.
He produced other religious scenes, full of pathos and theatricality, such as Christ Dead on the Cross, which he offered to the chapel of Saint-Aygulf, together with an Entombment. The landscape contributed to the exaggerated emotion, just as in Christ in the Garden on the Mount of Olives, where the light is both a symbolic element and a dramatic resource.
One of Carolus-Duran's rare successes in the field of the idealized nude, considered a superior form of art, was the Danaé of the Bordeaux Musée des Beaux-Arts: Carolus exhibited it in 1891 at the Salon of the National Society of Fine Arts. Half-way between academicism and flamboyance, Carolus here depicts one of the languid nudes to which the period was so partial and whose propriety was only just salvaged by the pretext of mythology. We should also mention Lilia, which met with great critical acclaim when it was exhibited in 1890 at the Artistic Society (Cercle de l'union artistique).
We should also include in this group Glory and Memory of the Siege of Paris, a sketch for a historical picture. This study made a great impression on Jules Claretie, a friend of Carolus, to the point where he wrote of it: "The day when Carolus Duran produces a picture from this sketch, he will have added a thrilling page to the history of art".
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