Carolus-Duran Reconsidered
In the middle of the 20th Century, condemnation of Carolus-Duran was unanimous. Until the exhibition Equivoques was held by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1973. The purpose of this exhibition was to restore to favour painters such as Couture, Manet's teacher, Ribot, Bonvin and Carolus-Duran "who have been too hastily relegated to an institutional destiny by their over-commercial fame." That same year, Michèle Le Gal submitted a thesis to the Louvre school, entitled Carolus-Duran. Sa vie, son oeuvre dessiné (Carolus-Duran. His Life, His Drawings), for which she undertook a major inventory and review. The Flavian Gallery in Paris then organized an exhibition of 31 paintings by Carolus, which met with unexpected success.
This illustrated Michèle Le Gal's core idea: "Carolus Duran has finally been released from purgatory. A true celebrity of the painting world and Parisian high society, the end of his life found him forgotten and consigned to oblivion. The speedy abandonment of one of the most vivid personalities of the early part of the Third Republic may be the price he had to pay for the extraordinary infatuation shown by the public and the majority of critics for a poor, almost self-taught artist". Likewise Jean Carolus-Duran, a great-grandson of the painter, and his wife have collected an impressive amount of documentation on his works and their repercussions which they have published as a descriptive catalogue. In 1999, a dissertation by Jennifer Raynal for her Master's degree in History of Art, Carolus-Duran au Salon. Recueil de critiques (Carolus-Duran at the Salon. Collection of Reviews), produced under the supervision of Bruno Foucart, gave an assessment of the official career of the painter and his resonance amongst his contemporaries.
The rehabilitation of Carolus-Duran has made itself evident by his inclusion in recent years in works on the history of art and in exhibitions. American art historians take pleasure in recalling that he was the master of John Singer Sargent. In 2001, Lady with a Glove (1869) was reproduced alongside Miss L. (1864) by James Tissot, in a history of French painting under the aegis of Pierre Rosenberg, and appears there as a representative of the most innovative trends of the period. In the exhibition Manet-Velasquez. The Spanish School in the 19th Century which was held at the Musée d'Orsay in 2002-2003, Carolus-Duran was represented by the Portrait of the Spanish painter Moreno.
Thus all the elements were in place for a retrospective exhibition, and the collection of the Museum of Lille having been enriched since 1986 by donations and acquisitions of paintings by the artist, this idea of a tribute became an imperative. All the more so since Carolus-Duran is now respected for all his work, and as a craftsman of "realistic painting", as the art historian Jacques Thuillier expressed it, devoting passionate attention to reality, to all that surrounds it, beyond imagination, beyond adaptation, a painter whose career is cohesive and original.
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