Louis Béroud

Collection R. J. Henault
Didier Aaron Galleries, Paris, London and New York
Mrs. Iris Cantor (acquired from the above in 1992)
Private collection (acquired in 2011)

Almanach surréaliste du demi-siecle (no. special de la Nef), nos. 63-64, March 1950, illustrated opp. p. 79
Cécile Ritzenthaler, L'ecole des Beaux-Arts du XIXe siècle, Les Pompiers, Paris, 1987, p. 32, illustrated|
Didier Aaron Galleries, Catalogue, Paris, London and New York, 1992, no. 24
Peter C. Sutton, The Age of Rubens, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Toledo Museum of Art, 1993-1994, p. 94, illustrated p. 93, fig 119
Hans Belting and Hellen Atkins, The Invisible Masterpiece, Chicago, 2001, illustrated p. 112

After visiting the Louvre in the 1870s, an American traveler noted that 'along the galleries are numerous temporary stands, easels, etc., at which artists are constantly at work copying such paintings as they may have orders for, or hope to find purchasers for' (as quoted in Barbara Stern Shapiro, Pleasures of Paris: Daumier to Picasso, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1991, p. 108). Stumbling across a working artist and his accoutrements was not a rare occurrence for the museum-goer in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Viewing and copying the museum's masterpieces was a traditional part of an artist's education, and a practice Béroud both enjoyed and used as the subject of at least twenty-six of his compositions. Indeed, the artist was such a frequent visitor to the Louvre that he is credited with sounding the alarm upon discovering the Mona Lisa's theft in 1911.

The Louvre held the entirety of art history, and its crowded walls offered a bounty of choices for diverse study. In the present work, Béroud places the dapper, mustachioed copyist among the paintings of the Marie de' Medici cycle, an aggrandized biography of the ruler, visualized in twenty four works executed by Peter Paul Rubens in the 1620s for the Luxembourg Palace, later reinstalled into a devoted gallery at the Louvre. The copyist sits before The Disembarkation of Marie de' Medici at Marseilles, one of the most popular in the cycle. The painting depicts Marie upon her marriage to Henry IV, as she walks down a gangplank into the open arms of an allegorical figure of France, while a trumpeting angel of Fame flies above and Neptune and his naiads rise from the sea. The muscular, fish-tailed naiads proved particularly tempting subjects to copy. Eugène Delacroix had copied one of the sensual mythological figures and, in the early 1820s, the British artist William Etty was compelled to paint a life-sized version explaining 'a glorious water nymph of Rubens I had long admired would not let me leave Paris without a memorial of some of her fleshy beauties' (Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, R.A., reprinted London, 1978, p. 210, as quoted in Sutton, p. 94). The painting even attracted more modern attention, with Paul Cézanne executing an evocative copy of the trio of naiads (Sutton, p. 94).

Béroud's copyist makes a similar choice, his canvas focusing on the figure on the right in broad, expressive strokes and dissonant colors of a fauvist style (Sutton, p. 94; Marie-Anne Dupuy, Copier Créer de Turner à Picasso: 300 oeuvres inspirées par les maîtres du Louvre, exh. cat., 1993, p. 67). His careful study is interrupted as the trio of naiads literally flows from the canvas on swirling waves which threaten to soak the gallery and wash him away. The copyist tosses his brush aside as his body is thrown back in shock at the surreal experience. The humor of the composition is further suggested by its title Les joies de l'inondation (The Joys of the Flood) as the rushing waters promise to bring the robust beauties into the artist's lap. Such levity may also serve to counter a serious situation the artist and his fellow Parisians experienced: in January 1910, the year of the present work's execution, the Seine overflowed its banks, bringing quick and catastrophic flooding to Paris (Didier Aaron Galleries, discussed under no. 24, Dupuy, p. 67). Water inundated several of the Louvre's basements, threatening the stored artworks. It was only through the rapidly organized and heroic efforts of Parisians working to build sandbag barricades that further destruction to the museum was prevented — allowing Béroud, his fellow artists, and generations of visitors since to continue to enjoy its many treasures (Jeffrey H. Jackson, Paris under Water: How the city of light survived the great flood of 1910, New York, 2010, pp. 98, 115-6).