Pierre-Amédée Marcel-Béronneau French, 1869-1937

Roberto Polo, Paris

Paris, Galerie Alain Blondel, 1981, illustrated in colour in the catalogue 

Original canvas. There is a band of retouching along the lower edge of the work visible under ultraviolet light which appears to have been added by the artist at a later stage. There are some lines of infilling to the craquelure under the figure's right armpit, some infilling within the background to the left of this, a spot on the figure's left breast and a few small scattered spots elsewhere. Apart from some areas of craquelure the paint surface is in good clean condition with strong colours and thick impasto. Held in a simple carved wooden frame.
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Painted in 1905, it is likely that Germaine Marchant was the model for Salome. Having fallen deeply in love with her, Marcel-Béronneau painted her obsessively in his pursuit of the representation of the femme fatale. They were married in 1918.

The present work depicts the end of Salome's dance of the seven veils. Her body is almost exposed in its entirety, with part of a veil draping her legs and hips and part of it surrounding her hair like a flame.

The myth of Salome captured the imagination and preoccupied fin-de-siècle painters, writers and composers alike. As recounted in the Gospels, Salome was the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee in Palestine. Her infamy comes from causing St. John the Baptist's execution. The saint had condemned the marriage of Herodias and Herod Antipas. Incensed, Herod imprisoned John, but feared to have the well-known prophet killed. Herodias, however, pressed her daughter Salome to seduce her stepfather Herod with a dance, making him promise to give her whatever she wished. At her mother's behest, Salome thus asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

It was notably the symbiosis of art and literature at the turn of the century that developed the image of Salome as a femme fatale. Salome was depicted numerous times by artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley. Oscar Wilde wrote his one-act play Salome, originally written in French, to shock audiences with its spectacle of perverse passions. Wilde's play in turn became the source and inspiration for Richard Strauss's one-act opera Salome, first produced in 1905. Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote about Moreau's 1876 Salome in his seminal novel A Rebours (Against the Grain) making Salome the object of his hero's fantasies of feminine evil. At the same time, Gustave Flaubert wrote his novel Herodias, and Stephane Mallarme was working on a poem entitled Herodiade.

Moreau's various representations of Salome (he did over seventy drawings of her) such as Salome, Salome Dancing before Herod and Salome Brandishing the Head of John the Baptist created a visual repertoire of femme fatales stories for the fin-de-siècle intellectual and artistic imagination. 

A student of Gustave Moreau, Marcel-Béronneau's work reflects the profound influence Moreau had on him. However, Moreau was a liberal teacher and nurtured a free spirit in his pupils. While Marcel-Béronneau's paintings explored similar subjects to Moreau, such as the themes of temptation, seduction, sensual pleasure, triumph, pain and death, the painterly execution of these works with their thick impasto and broad brushstrokes, as in the present work, differs significantly from the works of his teacher.